The published version of this article is available here at the American Economic Review.
Abstract
We assess South African workseekers' skills and disseminate the assessment results to explore how limited information affects firm and workseeker behavior. Giving workseekers assessment results that they can credibly share with firms increases workseekers' employment and earnings and better aligns their skills, beliefs and search strategies. Giving workseekers assessment results that they cannot easily share with firms has similar effects on beliefs and search, but smaller effects on employment and earnings. Giving assessment results only to firms shifts interview decisions. These findings show that getting credible skill information to the right agents can improve outcomes in the labor market.
Increases in the minimum wage can substantially reduce earnings inequality. To demonstrate this, we combine administrative and survey data with an equilibrium model of the Brazilian labor market.
Many firms in developing countries could be too small to adopt modern technology embodied in expensive production machines. This paper shows that rental market interactions allow these small firms to increase their effective scale and mechanize production.
Tracing out the effect of large economic stimuli on the pattern of transactions in an integrated economy, and their aggregate implications, has long been a central goal of economic analysis, but until now has not been studied experimentally.
We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harassment in organizations. We use the resulting data to answer policy relevant questions about the nature of harassment: How prevalent is it?