There are 420 million young people in Africa today. Understanding how youth search for jobs and what affects their ability to find good jobs is of paramount importance. We do so using a field experiment tracking young job seekers for six years in Uganda's main cities. We examine how two standard...

We conduct a randomized evaluation of two job-search support programs for urban youth in Ethiopia. One group of treated respondents receives a subsidy to cover the transport costs of job search. Another group participates in a job application workshop where their skills are certified and they...

We develop a dynamic model of transitions in and out of employment. A worker finds a job at an optimal stopping time, when a Brownian motion with drift hits a barrier. This implies that the duration of each worker's jobless spells has an inverse Gaussian distribution. We allow for arbitrary...

The continuing adverse labor market effects of the Great Recession have intensified interest in policy efforts to spur job creation. In periods when labor demand and supply are in balance, either hiring credits or worker subsidies can be used to boost employment - hiring credits by reducing...

Panel or grouped data are often used to allow for unobserved individual heterogeneity in econometric models via fixed effects. In this paper, we discuss identification of a panel data model in which the unobserved heterogeneity both enters additively and interacts with treatment variables. We...

How has the internet affected search and hiring, and what are the implications for aggregate unemployment? Answering these questions empirically has proven difficult due to selection in internet use and difficulty in measuring the search activities of both sides of the labor market. This paper...

Most governments are mandated to maintain their economies at full employment. We propose that the best marker of full employment is the efficient unemployment rate, u*. We define u* as the unemployment rate that minimizes the nonproductive use of labor--both jobseeking and recruiting. The...

This paper applies some of the key insights of dynamic discrete choice models to continuous-time job search models. We propose a novel framework that incorporates preference shocks into search models, resulting in a tight connection between value functions and conditional choice probabilities....

This study documents how job seekers update perceived job-finding prospects by unemployment duration and by learning about aggregate unemployment. We find that job seekers perceive an 18% decline in their job-finding probability for each additional month of unemployment, but perceive a higher...

We study the causal effects and policy implications of global supply chain disruptions. We construct a new index of supply chain disruptions from the mandatory automatic identification system data of container ships, developing a novel spatial clustering algorithm that determines real-time...