"GETTING ONLINE FOR JOBS!" REDUCING INFORMATION FRICTIONS THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN LOW-INCOME COUNTRY PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT SERVICES
"GETTING ONLINE FOR JOBS!" REDUCING INFORMATION FRICTIONS THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN LOW-INCOME COUNTRY PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT SERVICES
OUR AIMS
Ethiopia’s labour markets struggle to match job seekers with positions that are appropriate for them. Job seekers often fail to accurately convey their skills to employers, and to find out about current vacancies and information about the broader labour market. Detailed administrative data on firms and workers in Ethiopia’s formal labour market from 2011-2018 suggests that worker turnover is very high with almost half of this turnover being driven by workers leaving because they are fired and immediately replaced.
This project builds on a government initiative to digitise data collection in Ethiopia’s public employment services, aiming to understand how simple, low-cost interventions can reduce two-sided information frictions on downstream outcomes asking three key questions:
What is the impact of providing firms with information on job-seeker skills on hiring decisions and ultimate firm-level outcomes?
What is the impact of providing job-seekers with information about labour market conditions on their search behaviour and ultimate match quality?
How do these impacts vary by job seeker skill-lever and gender?
ABOUT THE PROJECT
This project, partnering with the Ethiopian government, will test the improved government labour market intermediation across the Ethiopian region of Tigray. Tigray, home to almost 10 million people, is one Ethiopia’s most dynamic and most urbanized regions, but like the rest of the country suffers from low state capacity in the provision of public employment services. Currently, local Bureau of Labor and Social Affairs (BoLSA) employment offices rely on paper based processes to register job seekers, vacancies are collected unsystematically, and employee-employer job matching is undertaken manually by government caseworkers.
Using a large-scale randomised control trial in 20 of Tigray’s rural and urban district (Woreda) employment office, the two main interventions of this project address information frictions on both sides of the labour market:
Information to job seekers about prevailing local wages in different sectors;
Information to firms about hard-to-observe worker skills.
While job-seeker information is randomised at the subdistrict level, firm information is randomised at the vacancy level. The main outcomes of interest focus on the number and quality of matches, with a particular emphasis on the gender dimension of occupational choice.
This project includes:
Introducing a government tablet application that is designed to streamline the registration of job seekers;
Complementing the administrative data collection with short tests of job seeker skills;
