We survey young job seekers in rural India to understand the determinants of enrollment in a government training program with guaranteed placement into urban jobs. Respondents are over-optimistic: they expect jobs that pay more and are closer to home than actual placement opportunities. We implement an RCT and provide them with objective information on the distribution of placement salaries or job locations. The intervention successfully corrects subjects’ beliefs, which affects their decision to enroll in the program. By revealed preferences, our estimates suggest that job seekers need to be paid 50% more to work outside their home state.

We use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impact of providing richer information about prospective jobs to vocational trainees on their employment outcomes. The setting of the study is the vocational training program DDU-GKY in India. We find that including in the training two information sessions about placement opportunities make trainees 18% more likely to stay in the jobs in which they are placed. We provide suggestive evidence that the effect is driven by improved selection into training: as a result of the intervention, trainees that are over-optimistic about placement jobs are more likely to drop out before placement.

This paper presents evidence on the short and long-term impact of the COVID-19 crisis on India's rural youth. We interviewed about 2,000 vocational trainees from Bihar and Jharkhand three times after the first national lockdown in 2020, between June 2020 and December 2021. We find that a third of respon-dents who were in salaried jobs pre-lockdown lost their jobs, and half of those who worked out of state returned home shortly after the lockdown. We report a stark difference between men and women: while many male workers took up informal employment, most female workers dropped out of the labour force. In the second part of the paper, we use a randomised experiment to document the effects of a government-supported digital platform designed to provide jobs to low-skilled workers. The platform turned out to be difficult to use and publicised only few job ads. We find no effect on job search intensity or employment. Our findings suggest that bridging the gap between rural young workers and urban for-mal labour markets requires more active and targeted policy interventions, especially for female workers. (c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

The pandemic was accompanied by a wave of adoption of remote work practices. This paper uses online job vacancy data to study how UK firms have adopted remote work. Overall, remote work increased by 300%. Our analysis finds little evidence that occupations have fundamentally changed to better accommodate remote work tasks, nor evidence of changes in the occupational composition of jobs. We find that the overall increase in remote working is driven by the increasing use of remote work at the firm level, especially among firms that were less likely to use remote work before the pandemic. This is con-sistent with changes in organisational practices or updated information about the viability of large-scale remote working. JEL codes : J23, J32.

Cette Note montre que cette persistance du chômage ne saurait trouver sa source principale dans des problèmes d’inadéquation entre offre et demande de travail, que ce soit en termes de localisation ou de compétences. Dès lors, si la formation professionnelle doit faciliter les réorientations, elle ne peut suffire à faire baisser de manière significative le niveau de chômage agrégé. Elle doit donc se concentrer sur les publics moins qualifiés et éloignés de l’emploi, sans que son volume ne soit augmenté.

We use data from Airbnb to identify the mechanisms underlying discrimination against ethnic minority hosts. Within the same neighborhood, hosts from minority groups charge 3.2 percent less for comparable listings. Since ratings provide guests with increasingly rich information about a listing's quality, we can measure the contribution of statistical discrimination, building upon Altonji and Pierret (2001). We find that statistical discrimination can account for the whole ethnic price gap: ethnic gaps would disappear if all unobservables were revealed. Also, three-quarters (2.5 points) of the initial ethnic gap can be attributed to inaccurate beliefs of potential guests about hosts' average group quality. (JEL D83, J15, L84)

Den har rapporten undersoker utvecklingen av antalet nyanmalda platser och sokaktiviteten pa Arbetsformedlingens jobbplattform Platsbanken i samband med utbrottet av covid-19. Antalet platsannonser minskade kraftigt under mars 2020, i synnerhet bland yrken inom hotell- och restaurang-, kultur- samt detalj-handelsbranschen. Samtidigt minskade de arbetssokande sin aktivitet pa platt-formen, vilket kan ha medfort storre svarigheter for arbetsgivarna att anstalla, trots att antalet arbetssokande okade kraftigt. Slutligen visar rapporten att arbets-sokande forandrade sitt sokintresse mot yrken som paverkats mindre negativt av krisen. Resultatet tyder pa en vilja hos sokande att anpassa sokbeteendet efter radande omstandigheter pa arbetsmarknaden.

In 2008 there was an expectation of major reform to social and economic structures following the financial crisis. The European Union (EU) referendum of 2016, and the UK’s subsequent exit from the EU in 2020, was also signalled as a turning point that would bring about epochal change. Now, in the waning of the coronavirus pandemic, we are experiencing a similar rhetoric. There is widespread agreement that the pandemic will usher in big changes for the economy and society, with the potential for major policy reform. But what will be the long-term impacts of the pandemic on the UK economy? Is the right response a “new settlement” or is some alternative approach likely to be more beneficial? This report puts forward a new perspective on the pandemic-related changes that could be ahead. The central theme is assessing the viability of epochal reform in policymaking. There seems to be a relentless desire for making big changes; however, there is arguably not enough recognition of how current settings and history can hold back these efforts. Foreword by: Dame Frances Cairncross, CBE, FRSE.

This paper measures the job-search responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using realtime data on vacancy postings and ad views on Sweden's largest online job board. First, the labour demand shock in Sweden is as large as in the US, and affects industries and occupations heterogeneously. Second, the scope and direction of search change. Job seekers respond to the shock by searching less intensively and by redirecting their search towards less severely hit occupations, beyond what changes in labour demand would predict. The redirection of job search changes relative hiring costs, and has the potential to amplify labour demand shifts.

We design a job recommender system that recommends job ads to Swedish job seekers. The job recommender system is hosted on the largest online job board in Sweden, and it is based on a collaborative filtering machine-learning algorithm. Within a two-sided randomized experiment, we evaluate how job seekers respond to job recommendations (clicks, applications, job finding, earnings), and whether employers fill their vacant jobs at a faster rate. This paper presents preliminary results for year 2020. We find that job seekers increase by 10-16% the number of daily clicks/applications on recommended vacancies. We do not find average effects on total job search intensity, job finding rates, or labor earnings. Current developments (e.g. increased saliency of the recommendations) lead to higher treatment effects for 2021 and this will be added to this draft over the next semester.

Suppose that a population, composed of a minority and a majority group, is allocated into units, which can be neighborhoods, firms, classrooms, etc. Qualitatively, there is some segregation whenever allocation leads to the concentration of minority individuals in some units more than in others. Quantitative measures of segregation have struggled with the small-unit bias. When units contain few individuals, indices based on the minority shares in units are upward biased. For instance, they would point to a positive amount of segregation even when allocation is strictly random. The command segregsmall implements three recent methods correcting for such bias: the nonparametric, partial identification approach of D’Haultfœuille and Rathelot (2017, Quantitative Economics 8: 39–73); the parametric model of Rathelot (2012, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 30: 546–553); and the linear correction of Carrington and Troske (1997, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 15: 402–409). The package also allows for conditional analyses, namely, measures of segregation accounting for characteristics of the individuals or the units.

Les inegalites entre les femmes et les hommes sont un trait marquant du marche du travail : elles se traduisent par une moindre participation des femmes, des remunerations inferieures a celles des hommes, ou encore des trajectoires professionnelles moins ascendantes. La contribution des conditions d’acces a l’emploi a ces inegalites professionnelles reste encore mal connue. Afin de mieux apprehender la discrimination a l’embauche selon le sexe, une experimentation de grande ampleur a ete menee, en envoyant des CV fictifs en reponse a plusieurs milliers d’offres d’emploi dans onze metiers distincts. Ces CV ne different que par le nom du candidat de facon a eliminer l’effet de la qualite des candidatures sur les chances de rappel lors de la premiere phase du processus de recrutement. Les candidatures feminines et masculines portant un prenom d’origine francaise ont globalement recu le meme accueil de la part des employeurs : un tiers ont ete rappelees, la moitie n’ont pas recu de reponse, les autres ont ete refusees. Des differences fortes apparaissent neanmoins selon le niveau de qualification, les femmes etant defavorisees pour les metiers peu qualifies tandis que l’inverse est observe pour les metiers de cadres avec encadrement. L’introduction dans les CV d’informations sur la situation familiale (presence d’enfants, situation maritale) ou indiquant une periode d’inactivite n’entraine aucune difference de traitement significative entre les candidatures feminines et masculines.