The Impact of an Online Job Fair: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

Norihiko Matsuda () and Ryotaro Hayashi ()
Additional contact information
Norihiko Matsuda: Florida International University
Ryotaro Hayashi: Asian Development Bank

No 689, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: Online job fairs are a new labor market intervention. This paper provides the first experimental evidence on their impact by evaluating an online fair for information and communication technology jobs in Bangladesh. The fair generated a non-negligible number of job offers; however, over 90% of them were rejected, so no effect on employment probability or type was found. Interestingly, jobseekers lowered their reservation wages, kept their jobs longer, and ended up in worse skill-matched jobs. The reason is that jobseekers initially had overoptimistic expectations, but learned about market conditions at the fair, lowered their expectations, and became discouraged from job search. As a result, those who had already been employed kept their jobs longer, even if the jobs did not match their skills, and those who had initially been unemployed ended up with lower employment probabilities and lower skill-match quality.

Keywords: job fair; job matching; online search; youth employment; Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J64 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2023-07-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ict and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/impact-online-job ... -evidence-bangladesh Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:adbewp:0689

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().