Do Inclusive Education Policies Improve Employment Opportunities? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Jorge Agüero, Francisco Galarza () and Gustavo Yamada

No 177, Working Papers from Peruvian Economic Association

Abstract: In labor markets where disadvantaged students are discriminated against, merit-based college scholarships targeting these students could convey two opposing signals to employers. There is a positive signal reflecting the candidate’s cognitive ability (talented in high-school and able to maintain a high GPA in college) as well as her soft skills (overcoming poverty). There is also a possible negative signal as the targeting of the scholarship indicates that the beneficiary comes from a disadvantaged household. We conduct a correspondence study to analyze the labor market impact of an inclusive education program. Beca 18 provides merit-based scholarships to talented poor students admitted to 3-year and 5-year colleges in Peru. We find that the positive signal dominates. Including information of being a scholarship recipient increases the likelihood of getting a callback for a job interview by 20%. However, the effect is much smaller in jobs and careers where the poor are under-represented, suggesting that the negative signal of the scholarship is not zero.

Keywords: Employment; inclusive education; correspondence study; discrimination. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 I23 J15 J7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
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Working Paper: Do Inclusive Education Policies Improve Employment Opportunities? Evidence from a Field Experiment (2022)
Working Paper: Do Inclusive Education Policies Improve Employment Opportunities? Evidence from a Field Experiment (2020)
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