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Searching with Friends

It is a fact that Social Networks play a key role in job search efforts. This is even more the case in Developing countries, where over 50% of individuals in job search report to find a job through Social Networks. This thus points to a situation where complementary knowledge among job searchers is quite important when it comes to find a job, start a search or just get informed about what the chances for a specific position might be.

This paper hence sets itself to investigate what the effect of Active Labor Market Policies might be in the process of knowledge and information sharing among job search peers. Using data from a field experiment in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, researchers find that these policies have a negative effect on the information sharing act between individuals treated by such a policy and those untreated. Furthermore, they also find that partners of treated individuals reduce their job-search efforts as well. This therefore indicates that a policy intervention that does not treat all can potentially create inequalities that reduce the strength of social networks and hence perhaps social capital, while potentially leading to a reduction of the job search of partners too. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

Young Adults and Labor Markets in Africa

Today, 1 in 5 new jobseekers have been born in Africa, by 2050 this ratio will have changed to 1 in 3. It is evident that by such a shift, societal and economic problems in the continent will worsen the longer jobseekers are not met with more job opportunities, i.e., that the employment demand is matched with a corresponding supply. Overcoming the vicious cycle and traps of an apparently unchanging dominance, in terms of quantity, of microenterprises and self-employed workers, makes structural change harder.

Making use of the dataset of the Jobs of the World Project, this Paper therefore attempts to analyse the trends in Labor Markets in Africa, by comparing their stage and structure to the one in other low- and middle-income countries. The dataset is constructed and harmonized using Demographic and Health Surveys from countries and IPUMS Censuses; both since 1990. In its analysis, the paper is able to describe the fact that the development process entails a transformation in the organization of labor: From micro-entrepreneurs to salaried workers in large firms. While this is the case when investigating the whole set of countries used for the paper, a striking stylized fact for African ones is that employment rates are similar at similar levels of development, but that young Adults in Africa are less likely to have a salaried job, especially when the size of the cohort is large. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

Jobs of the World Project Launch

Check out the Data Portal of the project here.

To see what the project is all about, register to the event here.

The Jobs of the World Project is a publicly available resource built to enable researchers to analyse comparable labour market outcomes across countries and time using micro data. At the core of the project is the collation and harmonisation of all available Censuses (IPUMS) and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for low- and middle-income countries. The two sources combined provides coverage of countries representing about 81 percent of the world’s population, and more than 90 percent of the population in low- and middle-income countries. A key innovation is the construction of comparable wealth measures that allow researchers to analyse labour market outcomes across wealth classes. The project has three outputs:

  • Codes that allow researchers to implement the harmonisation and produce customised data sets from publicly available IPUMS and DHS
  • The Jobs of the World Database (JWD). The database focuses on a wide range of labour market characteristics including, but not limited to: labour force participation, type of employment (e.g., waged or self-employment), sector of employment (e.g., agriculture, manufacturing, or service), skill level (e.g., managers and professionals, white collar, or blue collar)
  • Web platform to build downloadable maps and charts based on JWD

On May 3rd, 2022 between 18:00 – 19:30 CEST, the project will be officially launched in a hybrid event, with its presential part at the London School of Economics. The event will bring together researchers, media and policy makers together to present and comment the database and project, and to discuss its potential outreach and key patterns. You can register for the online part of the event here.

A small selection of our Projects

Our newest publications

Glass Walls: Experimental Evidence on Access Constraints Faced by Women

Access barriers can substantially constrain individuals from obtaining benefits. Using experimental evidence from Pakistan, we show distance poses a major hurdle for women in accessing a valued and subsidized skills training program. Women who have to travel a few kilometers outside their village for training are four times less likely to complete it than those whose village received a training center. This penalty is not readily reconciled with measured financial or time costs of travel and over half of it is incurred upon crossing the village boundary. Exogenous stipend variation reveals this “boundary effect” is costly to offset, requiring a cash transfer equivalent to half of household expenditure. While informational and social interventions don’t ameliorate this barrier, reliable group transportation helps. The importance of secure transport and additional results suggest the boundary effect may be partly due to safety concerns. A notable share of the boundary effect is explained by having to traverse underpopulated spaces, a proxy for threats to safety in this context. Our work provides experimental confirmation that access constraints faced by women are significant, costly to address monetarily, but can be ameliorated through locally attuned interventions.

Women’s Mobility and Labor Supply: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

In cities with conservative norms or high crime, female workers may face greater restrictions on their physical mobility. This limits women’s labor market opportunities and the pool of workers that firms can attract. In this study, we experimentally vary access to a transport service in Lahore, Pakistan, to quantify the overall impact of transport to work on men, women, and the differential impact of transport exclusively for women. We show that reducing physical mobility constraints has a large impact on job searching for women, including women who are not searching at baseline. Women’s response is driven by a women-only transport treatment arm, suggesting that safety and social acceptability, rather than simply cost, are key constraints.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Migrant Remittances in the Philippines

Money sent home by migrants working abroad is an important source of income, particularly in low and middle-income countries. In the Philippines, remittances represent ten percent of GDP, and about a quarter of Philippine households report receiving remittances. 1 With the outbreak of COVID-19 and its impact on the global economy, policymakers worried about the resilience of these important remittance flows. The lower-than-expected fall in remittances to low and middle income countries (-1.7% in 2020 versus -7.1% forecast)2 could be the result of a transition from informal to formal channels. Field studies are necessary to assess the correct dimension of the COVID shock. To investigate how pandemic closures and restrictions affect migrants’ income and remittances, researchers built on a previous study to conduct two rounds of phone surveys between Filipino migrants in the UAE and their families in the Philippines. A total of 1,188 migrants and 1,329 households participated in the first round of the survey, from September to November 2020. 1,081 migrants and 1,358 households participated in the second round, from March to May 2021.

Browsers Don’t Lie? Gender Differences in the Effects of the Indian Lockdown on Digital Activity and Time Use

We measure the digital impact of the initial Indian COVID-19 lockdown using an online survey coupled with consensually provided browser history records from over 1,000 individuals, spanning over 30 million website visits. Both men and women in our sample dramatically increased their internet activity during the lockdown, which reflects the heightened importance of digital access, but men’s activity increased by significantly more. Gender differences are present overall and for key categories including leisure, production, video streaming and social media. The exception is for self-investment through online learning websites and educational YouTube videos, where men and women had similar significant increases. Among full-time employed respondents, women’s lower browser usage is mainly in leisure browsing, while it is concentrated in productive activities among part-time workers and non-workers. The lockdown also saw a significant reduction in women’s online job search, alongside a significant increase in men’s, with larger effects among likely job seekers, indicating potentially persistent harm to women’s employment. The gender gap is larger among parents, consistent with increased childcare obligations as the driver. Yet in our survey, fathers self-reported significantly larger increases in childcare time than mothers. This relative increase in paternal childcare was not corroborated in partners’ reports or in childcare-related browser usage, which we identify leveraging machine learning methods to analyze text from website titles and YouTube video descriptions. The inconsistency within the self-reported data and contrast with the digital trace data underscore the value of accessing objective “digital footprint” records to gain insight into time use and activity.

Gender Gaps: Back and Here to Stay?

We investigate gender disparities in the effect of COVID-19 on the labor market outcomes of skilled Ugandan workers. Leveraging a high-frequency panel dataset, we find that the lockdowns imposed in Uganda reduced employment by 69% for women and by 45% for men, generating a previously nonexistent gender gap of 20 p.p. Eighteen months after the onset of the pandemic, the gap persisted: while men quickly recovered their pre-pandemic career trajectories, 10% of the previously employed women definitively separated from the labor market, and another 35% remained occasionally employed. Additionally, the lockdowns permanently shifted female workers to sectors misaligned with their skill sets, relocated them into agriculture and other unskilled sectors, and widened the gender pay gap. Pre-pandemic sorting of women into economic sectors subject to the strongest restrictions and childcare responsibilities induced by schools’ prolonged closure only explain up to 57% of the employment gap.

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