This project aims to understand workers’ selfselection and firm’s screening on potential employees, as well as the impact of being employed at a large, modern manufacturing factory on the workers.
Alfonsi, Bandiera, Bassi, Burgess, Rasul, Sulaiman and Vitali (2019) design a labor market experiment to compare demand- and supply-side policies to tackle youth unemployment, a key issue in low-income countries.
This study measures the impact of a business training program for women in Kenya, finding that training increases the profits, sales, mental health, and subjective well-being of women.
This study finds that vocational training and apprenticeships both raise employment of poor Ugandan youth, but vocational training provides general skills that foster mobility and result in higher earnings.
Adhvaryu, Kala and Nyshadham (2017) evaluate the causal impacts of on-the-job soft skills training on the productivity, wages, and retention of female garment workers in India. The program increased women’s extraversion and communication, and spurred technical skill upgrading.
Firms in poor countries are much smaller than firms in rich countries, with the modal firm being a single person, the owner. Meanwhile, youth unemployment and underemployment are widespread.
Adhvaryu, Nyshadham and Tamayo (2017) study 5 distinct factors of managerial quality that are likely to impact learning by doing within the firm: vocation-specific experience, managerial autonomy, cognitive skills, personality, and demographic relatability to workers.
Preliminary results indicate that trainees have strong preferences over salary and job locations and their placement officers (who are solely responsible for trainee placements) have poor knowledge of these preferences.
Hardy and McCasland (2017) report the results of a field experiment that randomly placed unemployed young people as apprentices with small firms in Ghana.
A common concern with efforts to directly help some small businesses to grow is that their growth comes at the expense of their unassisted competitors. In this study, McKenzie and Puerto (2017) test this possibility using a two-stage randomized experiment in Kenya.
