Matching Firms and Workers in a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

Girum Abebe, Stefano Caria, Marcel Fafchamps, Paolo Falco, Simon Franklin, Simon Quinn and Forhad Shilpi

SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Do matching frictions affect youth employment in developing countries? We organise job fairs in Addis Ababa, to match firms with a representative sample of young, educated job-seekers. We create very few jobs: one for approximately 10 firms that attended. We explore reasons for this, and find significant evidence for mismatched expectations: about wages, about firms requirements and about the average quality of job-seekers. We find evidence of learning and updating of beliefs in the aftermath of the fair. This changes behaviour: both workers and firms invest more in formal job search after the fairs.

Keywords: matching; labour; job-search; firms; recruitment; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J24 J61 J64 O18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Working Paper: Matching firms and workers in a field experiment in Ethiopia (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:sercdp:0225

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