Relatively little is known about the extent to which challenges in finding and hiring workers may hinder firms’ growth. This research aims to fill this gap by conducting a trichotomous study: it will generate systematic panel data on job vacancies and fillings for approximately 2,800 Bangladeshi garment manufacturers; it will perform an RCT by providing workers from the treated group with information about job vacancies; and it will use the minimum wage hike scheduled for end of 2023 to study within-firm changes in job vacancies. The resulting data will allow researchers to study vacancies and hiring practices across and within firms over time, while also providing a potential input to a general equilibrium model of job search in Bangladesh’s labour market.
After very successful piloting, this project will conduct an initial in person survey with HR managers from the 2,800 garment producers followed by eight phone-based surveys. The questionnaire for the in-person visit will cover basic production and employment information, HR challenges and hiring practices, and detailed enumeration of the job vacancies that the factory has for the subsequent month. The phone-based follow up questionnaires will cover basic employment information, information on the success of filling a randomly selected factory vacancy from the previous month, and enumeration of the job vacancies for the subsequent month. The project will also use this data collection to conduct an RCT where the treated group will receive information about job vacancies. Because of the RCT, the project will also collect a panel of garment workers’ job search and employment outcomes to provide another source of information on hiring and job attributes in sampled factories. Lastly, Bangladesh raised its minimum wage in November 2023, offering the opportunity to study within-firm changes in job vacancies and potentially develop a general equilibrium model of job search in Bangladesh’s labour market.
This panel data on job vacancies and hiring will suggest whether alleviating labour market frictions through policy implementation is an important factor towards upgrading quality and moving up the value chain from lower to higher-skilled workers. The research will also study how gender requirements may be important for understanding gender inequality in the labour market, while also providing matched employer-employee data, both of which are under-researched fields for low-income countries.
