This study evaluates the employment effects of a publicly-run national technical vocational education training program in Brazil that explicitly takes input from firms in determining the location, scale, and skill content of courses offered. Using exogenous course capacity restrictions, the...

Is a five-day workweek followed by a two-day weekend a socially optimal schedule? This paper presents a model in which labor productivity and the marginal utility of leisure evolve endogenously over the workweek. Labor productivity is shaped by two forces: restfulness, which decreases over the...

Rising youth unemployment rates have been increasingly recognized as a serious challenge in developing and advanced economies, as the trend indicates a potential skills gap between the demands of the workforce and recent graduates. Effective dual education programs utilizing a combination of...

This paper examines the relationship between individuals? skills and labor market outcomes for the working-age population of Colombia?s urban areas. Using a 2012 unique household survey, the paper finds that cognitive skills (aptitudes to perform mental tasks such as comprehension or reasoning)...

This study uses a randomized experiment to evaluate the impacts of the training and internship program piloted in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu counties by the Kenya Private Sector Alliance and the Government of Kenya with support from the World Bank?s Kenya Youth Empowerment Project. The program...

A number of developing countries are currently promoting vocational education and training (VET) as a way to build human capital and strengthen economic growth. The primary aim of this study is to understand whether VET at the high school level contributes to human capital development in one of...

This paper presents findings from the impact evaluation of the Economic Empowerment of Adolescent Girls and Young Women (EPAG) project in Liberia. The EPAG project was launched by the Liberian Ministry of Gender and Development in 2009 with the goal of increasing the employment and income of...

A randomized experiment is used to evaluate a large-scale, active labor market policy: Turkey's vocational training programs for the unemployed. A detailed follow-up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity. The average...

Interventions aimed at increasing the income generating capacity of the poor, such as vocational training, micro-finance or business grants, are widespread in the developing world. How to target such interventions is an open question. Many programs are self-targeted, but if perceived returns...

This paper analyzes the link between firm size and investment in job training by employers. Using a large firm level data set across 99 developing countries, the analysis shows that a strong and positive correlation in investment in job training and firm size is a robust statistical finding both...