Job vacancies and hiring by large employers in Bangladesh

Relatively little is known about the extent to which challenges in finding and hiring workers – in general and workers with the right skills – hinder firms’ growth, in large part due to the dearth of systematic evidence on job posting and filling by firms in labor markets in developing countries. This research aims to fill this gap by generating systematic panel data on job vacancies and fillings by approximately 2,200 Bangladeshi garment manufacturers in peri-urban Dhaka, Bangladesh. To do so, we have partnered with Mapped in Bangladesh (MiB) to gain access to the GPS locations of the universe of garment factories in peri-urban Dhaka and collect and HR manager survey and vacancy panel. The resulting data will provide rich spatial and time series variation in job vacancies and hiring, allowing us to document a novel set of stylized facts about vacancies and hiring practices across firms and within firms over time and a potential input to a general equilibrium model of job search in Bangladesh’s labor market.