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

Bandiera, Oriana ORCID: 0009-0002-6817-793X, Bassi, Vittorio, Burgess, Robin ORCID: 0009-0002-1187-3248, Rasul, Imran, Sulaiman, Munshi and Vitali, Anna (2025) The search for good jobs: evidence from a six-year field experiment in Uganda. Journal of Labor Economics, 43 (3). ISSN 0734-306X

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/7284...
Additional Information:	© 2025 University of Chicago Press
Divisions:	Economics
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
JEL classification:	J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies > J64 - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search O - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O12 - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
Date Deposited:	29 Aug 2023 14:48
Last Modified:	11 Jun 2025 07:18
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/120080

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