G²LM|LIC

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in income and employment generation in local economies, and SMEs account for a large share of businesses in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). A field experiment in Bangladesh provides informal firms information on occupational health and safety (OHS). A sub-treatment arm provides firms with financial linkages to address credit constraint. Two years after the intervention, treated firms are more likely to invest in health and safety measures and firm owners and workers have increased health and safety knowledge. Treated firms are also more likely to hire new apprentices and more experienced skilled workers and foremen. However, there is no effect on profit. The authors find no additional effect due to financial linkages, suggesting that addressing the information gap is key to improving OHS.
The findings suggest that policies to improve work environment in the informal sector should center on information on OHS. Read the working paper here.

The Kenya Life Panel Survey – COVID 19 Sample (KLPS) data visualization portal gives answers to queries relating to income, consumption, labor supply, food security, COVID-19 and mental health parameters. One can easily switch between viewing the entire sample characteristics, or navigate gender wise as well as between rural and urban sectors. This data visualization portal provides detailed measures of hours worked, child care responsibilities and the grim situation of unemployment and layoffs. Issues relating to mental health are vividly represented through graphs, making it easier to decipher the current mental health scenario of the sample as we track them, batch wise. This page is constantly updated to deliver the most recent results through visually appealing and extremely informative graphs.

The data is an outcome of the research project “Gender Effects of COVID-19: Evidence from the Kenya Life Panel Survey“. For more information about the research project, check the details here and read the policy brief here.

Job fairs have been one of the most explored paths to gain entry into the labor market by young entrants. Frictions are likely to be more prevalent in a rapidly growing urban center in a low-income setting. Our new Working Paper No. 49 reports its findings from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. In this paper, we evaluate the impacts of a job fair intervention that decreases meeting costs between large firms and young job-seekers, randomizing fair attendance among workers and among firms. The fairs generate a rich set of interactions between workers and firms, but very few hires: one for every twelve firms that attended. On the other hand, the fairs motivate both firms and workers to invest more in job search, which leads to better employment outcomes for some job-seekers. Using data from a unique two-sided survey with a new sample of young workers and firms alongside data from the fairs, we show that these impacts are driven by the fact that both firms and workers have inaccurate beliefs about fundamental aspects of the labor market- in particular, the distribution of skills and the competitiveness of specific occupations, which are corrected at the job fairs. Overall, our evidence suggests that, beyond directly slowing down efficient matching in the labor market, search frictions can impose a second, understudied cost: they entrench inaccurate beliefs, further distorting search strategies and the allocation of talent.