We present field experimental evidence that limited information about workseekers' skills distorts both firm and workseeker behavior. Assessing workseekers' skills, giving workseekers their assessment results, and helping them to credibly share the results with firms increases workseekers'...

Formal sector entry-level jobs in Mexico offer low starting salaries but substantial wage growth. This paper experimentally tests whether a six-months wage incentive can increase formal employment among secondary school graduates. Combining survey and high-frequency social security data, the...

In low-income communities in both rich and poor countries, redistributive transfers within kin and social networks are frequent. Such arrangements may distort labor supply—acting as a "social tax" that dampens the incentive to work. We document that across countries, from Cote d'Ivoire to the...

Governments around the developing world face pressure to intervene actively to help jobseekers find employment. Two of the most common policies used are job training, based on the idea that many of those seeking jobs lack the skills employers want, and job search assistance, based on the...

As of 2019, more than 1.2 million Venezuelans have passed through Ecuador and over 400,000 settled in, which amounts to almost 3% of Ecuador's population. This paper analyzes the location choices of Venezuelan migrants within Ecuador and the labor market consequences of these choices, using data...

Ecuador has become the third largest receiver of the 4.3 million Venezuelans that left their country in the last five years, hosting around 10% of them. Little is known about the characteristics of these migrants and their labor market outcomes. This paper fills this gap, analyzing a new large...

We present field experimental evidence that limited information about workseekers' skills distorts both firm and workseeker behavior. Assessing workseekers' skills, giving workseekers their assessment results, and helping them to credibly share the results with firms increases workseekers'...

We study the aftermath of the 1968 Washington, DC civil disturbance to illuminate the mechanisms that drive urban redevelopment in the presence of low demand and racial tension. After establishing that civil disturbance property destruction was quasi-random within blocks, we show that destroyed...

Using variation in federal pandemic-era fiscal aid to states driven by the strength of political representation, we find that incremental pandemic-era fiscal aid to states was most likely to end up in the categories of general administrative service spending and employee pension benefit funding....

The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented levels of federal aid transfers to state governments. Did this funding increase benefit state incumbents electorally? Identifying the effect of revenue windfalls on economic voting is challenging because whatever conditions led to the influx of cash...