Job fairs: matching firms and workers in a field experiment in Ethiopia

Girum Abebe, Stefano Caria, Marcel Fafchamps, Paolo Falco, Simon Franklin, Simon Redmond Quinn and Forhad Shilpi

No 8092, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Do matching frictions affect youth employment in developing countries? This paper studies a randomized controlled trial of job fairs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The job fairs match firms with a representative sample of young, educated job-seekers. The meetings at the fairs create very few jobs: one for approximately 10 firms that attended. The paper explores reasons for this, and finds significant evidence for mismatched expectations: about wages, about firms'requirements, and the average quality of job-seekers. There is evidence of learning and updating of beliefs in the aftermath of the fair. This changes behavior: both workers and firms invest more in formal job search after the fairs.

Keywords: Labor Policies; Rural Labor Markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06-07
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Working Paper: Job Fairs: Matching Firms and Workers in a Field Experiment in Ethiopia (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8092

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