Labor Market Information Provision and Job FairsService Sector Female Labor Preference

Vacancy Competition Non-Congestion

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In Simple Words

Imagine a restaurant with ten open tables and only two dining parties present. If a promotion brings eight more parties to the restaurant, everyone gets seated and served without taking a table away from existing diners. Crowding only happens when all tables are full; when capacity is underutilized, adding participants creates no conflict.

Lahore jobseekers not assigned calls

Less exposure to called rivals
Comparison exposure
More exposure to called rivals
No clear change in interview chance

Estimated 25th-to-75th percentile exposure contrast: +0.006 percentage points, not significant. Control applicants only; interviews, not jobs.

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Research question

Active labor market interventions that increase application rates for targeted jobseekers risk creating negative spillovers by crowding out non-targeted candidates or congesting employer hiring workflows without increasing overall hiring.

Participants

N = 1,116,446 jobseeker-vacancy matches across 1,340 employer vacancies in Lahore, Pakistan.

Study Design

Cluster-randomized spillover analysis evaluating variation in vacancy-level treatment exposure rates across an interquartile range of [0.43, 0.52].

Results

Shifting a jobseeker from the 25th to the 75th percentile of exposure to treated competitors changed control group interview probability by +0.006 percentage points (p = 0.589) and treated group probability by -0.011 percentage points (p = 0.511).

Takeaway

Scale job application encouragement programs across matching platforms without restricting participation out of concern for applicant crowd-out when platform vacancy fill rates remain well below capacity.

Source and citation

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Read alongside the research

Plain-English glossary

Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.

Percentage points

The difference between two percentages.

ExampleA rise from 40% to 50% is 10 percentage points. Relative to the starting value, that is a 25% increase.

Office for National Statistics · Percentages ↗Read more about percentage points →

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