The search for good jobs: evidence from a six-year field experiment in Uganda

Oriana Bandiera, Vittorio Bassi, Robin Burgess, Imran Rasul, Munshi Sulaiman and Anna Vitali

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: There are 420 million young people in Africa today, and only one in three has a regular salaried job. We study how two common labor market interventions—vocational training and matching—affect the job search behavior of young workers. We do so by means of a field experiment tracking young job seekers for 6 years in Uganda’s main cities. Vocational training amplifies the job seekers’ initial optimism, leading them to search more intensively and toward high-quality firms. Adding matching has the opposite effect, plausibly because of low callback rates. These differences affect labor market outcomes in the long run.

JEL-codes: J64 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2025-07-31
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Published in Journal of Labor Economics, 31, July, 2025, 43(3). ISSN: 0734-306X

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