This paper reports the results from a randomized experiment designed to evaluate the direct and indirect (displacement) impacts of job placement assistance on the labor market outcomes of young, educated job seekers in France. We use a two-step design. In the first step, the proportions of job...

At the turn of the 20th century, state and local governments in the United States began to establish public employment offices. These non-profit governmental organizations match job seekers and businesses, one of their main objectives being to protect job seekers from fraudulent activities by...

Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) are entities or institutions that interpose themselves between workers and firms to facilitate, inform, or regulate how workers are matched to firms, how work is accomplished, and how conflicts are resolved. This paper offers a conceptual foundation for...

From 1986 through 1997 the entry-level market for American gastroenterologists was organized by a centralized clearinghouse. Before, and since, it has been conducted via a decentralized market in which appointment dates have unraveled to well over a year before the start of employment. The...

We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibits considerable bunching at round numbers that cannot be explained by rounding of survey respondents. We consider two explanations—worker left-digit bias and employer optimization frictions. We experimentally rule out left-bunching by...

The collapse of the clearinghouse for the entry-level gastroenterology labor market offers a unique opportunity to study how stable clearinghouses succeed and fail. To explore the reasons for the failure of the clearinghouse (and why failures of this kind of clearinghouse have been so rare), we...

Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous and the quality of their interaction when paired is difficult to forecast. The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening? I discuss three labor market features that may be altered:...

The British New Deal for Young People began in January 1998. After 6 months of unemployment, 18-24 year olds are mandated to enter a `Gateway' period where they are given extensive job search assistance. If they are unable to obtain an unsubsidised job, then they can enter one of four New Deal...

Federal and state employment programs for low-skilled workers typically emphasize rapid placement of participants into jobs and often place a large fraction of participants into temporary-help agency jobs. Using unique administrative data from Detroit's welfare-to-work program, we apply the...