Job Fairs: Matching Firms and Workers in a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Anonymity or Distance? Job Search and Labour Market Exclusion in a Growing African City

“…7 In line with these results, we do not find aggregate employment effects through improved market access. In a companion field experiment, we run a job fair with an additional sample drawn from the same population (Abebe et al, 2017); consistent with the results in this paper, and with results in Groh et al (2015) and Beam (2016), that job fair generates very few successful matches, and has no detectable effect on total employment. 8 The current paper helps to explain why such matching interventions are unlikely to have large employment effects.…”

Vocational training programs and youth labor market outcomes: Evidence from Nepal

“…10 Most of the vocational training literature on similar programs in high-or middle-income countries finds low or insignificant effects (Card et al, 2010;Kluve, 2010;Dar and Tzannatos, 1999). 11 Other authors document similarly sized impacts based on related active labor market policies such as wage subsidies (Galasso et al, 2004;Groh et al, 2016;Levinsohn et al, 2014)) or search and matching assistance (Abebe et al, 2016a(Abebe et al, , 2016bFranklin, 2015;Jensen, 2012;Groh et al, 2015;Dammert et al, 2015;Beam, 2016;Abel et al, 2016;Bassi and Nansamba, 2017) or education-related interventions documented by Nikolov and Jimi (2018).…”

Linkedin(to) Job Opportunities: Experimental Evidence from Job Readiness Training

“…But they are larger than offline job search networks in similar settings. Young workseekers in Addis Ababa and Johannesburg regularly discuss their job search with a median of 2-6 people (Abebe et al, 2017;Caria et al, 2018;Carranza et al, 2019). However, we do not observe if workseekers in our sample regularly interact with their LinkedIn connections on or off the platform.…”

“…But any matching that takes place is decentralized, not managed centrally as part of the treatment. The literature on centralized matching has yielded mixed results, with few studies finding large positive effects on employment (Groh et al, 2015;Beam, 2016;Abebe et al, 2017).…”