Job Fairs: 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

No 2017-06, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

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 rms 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
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Working Paper: Job fairs: matching firms and workers in a field experiment in Ethiopia (2017)
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