Learning Management Through Matching: A Field Experiment Using Mechanism Design

Girum Abebe, Marcel Fafchamps, Michael Koelle and Simon Quinn

No 26035, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: What is the effect of exposing motivated youth to firm management in practice? To answer this question, we place young professionals for one month in established firms to shadow middle managers. Using random assignment into program participation, we find positive average effects on wage employment, but no average effect on the likelihood of self-employment. Within the treatment group, we match individuals and firms in batches using a deferred-acceptance algorithm. We show how this allows us to identify heterogeneous treatment effects by firm and intern. We find striking heterogeneity in self-employment effects, but almost no heterogeneity in wage employment. Estimates of marginal treatment effects (MTE) are then used to simulate counterfactual mechanism design. We find that some assignment mechanisms substantially outperform random matching in generating employment and income effects. These results demonstrate the importance of treatment heterogeneity for the design of field experiments and the role of matching algorithms in intervention design.

JEL-codes: J24 O1 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-exp and nep-lma
Note: DEV PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26035.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Learning Management Through Matching: A Field Experiment Using Mechanism Design (2020)
Working Paper: Learning Management Through Matching: A Field Experiment Using Mechanism Design (2019)
Working Paper: Learning Management through Matching: A Field Experiment Using Mechanism Design (2019)
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:nbr:nberwo:26035

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26035

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().