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

We show that helping young job-seekers to signal their skills to employers can generate large and persistent improvements in labour market outcomes. We do this by comparing an intervention that improves the ability to signal skills (the ‘job application workshop’) to a transport subsidy treatment de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Abebe, Girum, Caria, A Stefano, Fafchamps, Marcel, Falco, Paolo, Franklin, Simon, Quinn, Simon
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2018
Subjects
Economic models
Labor market
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Summary:We show that helping young job-seekers to signal their skills to employers can generate large and persistent improvements in labour market outcomes. We do this by comparing an intervention that improves the ability to signal skills (the ‘job application workshop’) to a transport subsidy treatment designed to reduce the cost of job search. We ?nd that in the short-run both interventions have large positive effects on the probability of ?nding formal jobs. The workshop also increases the probability of having a stable job with an open-ended contract. Four years later, the workshop signi?cantly increases earnings, job satisfaction and employment duration, while the effects of the transportsubsidyhavedissipated. Thesegainsareconcentratedamonggroupswhogenerally have worse labour market outcomes. Overall, our ?ndings highlight that young people possess valuable skills that are unobservable to employers. Making these skills observable generates earning gains that are far greater than the cost of the intervention.