Original source
Anonymity or Distance? Job Search and Labour Market Exclusion in a Growing African City
Dated research draft · Version date: 19 August 2018
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Cost-Effective ALMP Interventions
"The job application workshop generates an average wage gain of USD 10 per month per worker, for a one-off cost of USD 18.20 per individual. This compares favourably to other available labour market interventions..."
Conservative Attrition Bounding and Imputation
"However, we are able to estimate economically large and statistically significant effects of the workshop in the large majority of cases. For instance, the size of the effect is above 10 percent of the control group mean in all simulations but one."
Asymmetric Cost-Effectiveness in Active Labor Market Policies
"Second, this intervention is unusually cheap (high-impact interventions tend to be training programs that cost several hundred dollars per participant). As a result, the ratio of the monthly earning gains to the marginal one-off cost is unusually high for this intervention."
Discontinuous Skill Certification Effect
"We find that being placed in a higher band generates a large, but noisily estimated increase in wages in 2018... the effect is consistently between 0.2 and 0.3 standard deviations and is significant at the 10 percent level when we use the larger bandwidth."
Employment Path Dependency and Scarring
Precarious Employment Path Dependency
"Most strikingly, having any job after one year is not correlated with earnings at all after controlling for having a permanent or formal job. That is, individuals who had temporary or informal jobs after year do not have higher earnings that those that were unemployed."
Endogenous Stratification Equity Gains
Endogenous Stratification and Equity Gains
"The estimated effect size for the low-predicted-earnings group is about 50% of the control mean. This causes a large reduction in earning inequality: the earning gap between the low and the high earnings group drops from 142 percent to 54 percent..."
Signal Variance Reduction for Risk-Averse Firms
"The key insight from this model is that tightening signals over workers' ability increases match quality and therefore wages, as long as the firm is risk neutral or moderately risk averse."
Decoupling of Entry Wages from Aggregate Economic Growth
"Average wages in the control group grew at roughly the rate of inflation, during a period when the economy was growing at 8% per year. This lack of wage growth appears to be related to the inability to find stable work."
Hawthorne Effect Mitigation in Phone Surveys
"Franklin (2017) shows that high-frequency phone surveys of this type are reliable, in the sense of not generating Hawthorne effects."
High-Frequency Phone Panel Methodology
"Fourth, we combine face-to-face survey data with a high-frequency phone questionnaire. This enables us to document the mechanisms through which job-seekers find better jobs and to analyse their immediate response to each intervention in a way that recall data would not permit."
Inter-Firm Job Mobility for Wage Growth
"Only about 13 percent of workers hold the same job that they had at the first endline, three years before. Further, treated workers have not been employed in their current job for longer than control workers... These findings underscore the importance of job mobility for wage growth"
Job Stability Preference over Self-Employment
"when asked what kind of work they were looking for, 64% said they were looking specifically for a permanent job, whereas only 25% reported they were applying to jobs without consideration for the contract type. Only 5.4% of respondents said that they were trying to start their own business"
Educational Labor Market Segmentation
"For instance, a worker with tertiary education is seven times more likely to have a permanent job and four times more likely to have a formal job than a worker who has only completed high school."
Liquidity Constraints in Optimal Job Search
"When resources for job search are exhausted, credit constrained job-seekers are forced to accept poorly-matched jobs."
Match Quality Optimization via Noise Reduction
"First, treated young people stay in the same job for a longer period of time. Employment duration is often considered a key indicator of match quality as it is evidence that both the firm and the employee value the match."
Multi-Dimensional Skill Portfolio Signaling
"Indeed, 44% of workers score in the top band for at least one skill and only 10% of workers are in the lower half of the distribution for all skills. Further, we find that earnings in the treatment group strictly stochastically dominate earnings in the control."
Randomized Saturation Design for Network Spillovers
"We document a positive indirect effect on formal and permanent work among control individuals in clusters with 40 percent saturation. We also document that untreated individuals in clusters with 90 percent saturation are 5.6 percentage points less likely to be in permanent employment than individuals in pure control clusters."
Omnibus Super-Family Index Inference
"In addition to investigating each outcome in a family separately, we use a standard 'omnibus' approach: we construct an index for each family and test whether the index is affected by our treatments... we report both p values and false discovery rate q-values by treating each index as a separate member of a 'super-family' of indices."
Pure Signaling Value of Grade Discontinuities
"We find that being placed in a higher band generates a large, but noisily estimated increase in wages in 2018... being just above the cut-off leads to large increase in earnings of 0.33 standard deviations..."
Randomized Saturation Spillover Dynamics
"We find no difference between untreated individuals living in geographical clusters assigned to one of the two interventions and untreated individuals in pure control clusters."
Decoupling Search Intensity from Employment Outcomes
"The job application workshop, on the other hand, does not affect the likelihood of searching for a job or the number of job applications sent... In the short run it increases the probability of permanent and formal work without increasing the intensity of job search."
Search Intensity vs Search Efficiency Divergence
"The job application workshop, on the other hand, does not affect the likelihood of searching for a job or the number of job applications sent... Indeed, in Table A.18 we show that the workshop improves the conversion rates of job applications to job offers..."
Signal Variance Reduction Model
"...a treatment reducing the noise of an applicant's signal will enable the firm to make a better assessment of the applicant's suitability for the job compared to other candidates. This will increase the expected value of a match for the firm, and increase the expected wage."
Skill Certification and Signaling Workshop
"We show that helping young job-seekers to signal their skills to employers can generate large and persistent improvements in labour market outcomes."
Skill Signaling via Application Workshop
"Four years later, the workshop significantly increases earnings, job satisfaction and employment duration, while the effects of the transport subsidy have dissipated. These gains are concentrated among groups who generally have worse labour market outcomes."
Spatial Search Cost Frictions
"In other words, lowering the search cost gets young workers a formal job faster, but it does not change their long-term employment outcome."
Spatial Distance Frictions in Centralized Job Search
"among individuals in the control group, living 10 km closer to the centre of the city is associated with visiting the job boards 6.7 more times in a year (0.4 of a standard deviation) and making 1.9 more applications to permanent jobs (0.5 of a standard deviation)."
Statistical Stereotype Mitigation via Signal Precision
"the condition shows that a reduction in noise is valued by applicants who (i) are a strong match (that is, higher $x_{if}$), and (ii) who have a worse observable (that is, lower $z_i$)."
Statistical Discrimination Mitigation
"The long-run earning impact of the workshop is similarly concentrated among workers with the worst labour market prospects, i.e., those with the least education and experience."
Transport Search Cost Subsidy
"We find confirmation that search costs are a significant barrier to job search. However, in our representative sample these effects are weak and ultimately short lived."
Uncredentialed Job Fair Ineffectiveness
"Our analysis of that job fair intervention reveals that job-fairs have no significant impacts on employment and earnings but can help correcting biased beliefs on the part of firms and workers regarding the composition of the labour force"