Employers around the world complain that youth lack the soft skills needed for success in the workplace. In response, a number of employment programs have begun to incorporate soft skills training, but to date there has been little evidence as to the effectiveness of such programs. This paper...

This paper evaluates a youth internship program in Yemen. We examine the demand for the program and find an oversupply of graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and a relative undersupply of graduates in marketing and business. Conditional on the types of graduates firms...

This paper evaluates a youth internship program in the Republic of Yemen that provided firms with a 50 percent subsidy to hire recent graduates of universities and vocational schools. The first round of the program took place in 2014 and required both firms and youth to apply for the program....

We study the effect of a job training program for low income youth in Cordoba, Argentina. The program included life-skills and vocational training, as well as internships with private sector employers. Participants were allocated by means of a public lottery. We rely on administrative data on...

Online job fairs are a new labor market intervention. This paper provides the first experimental evidence on their impact by evaluating an online fair for information and communication technology jobs in Bangladesh. The fair generated a non-negligible number of job offers; however, over 90% of...

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda's entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student...

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda's entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student...

Until very recently, the conventional wisdom was that the return to education was very high in Africa. However, some recent analysis point to low average returns to education in some African countries including Nigeria. Given these low returns to education, a relevant question is what causes low...

We use a randomized controlled trial to examine the short- and mid-term impacts of a best-practice training program on (non-)employment outcomes in Ghana. Overall the program did not affect core labor market outcomes at the extensive (employment) and intensive (hours of work, income) margin, but...

This paper evaluates an ambitious and newly designed program for increased integration in Sweden. The purpose of the program is to help newly arrived, low-educated refugees into employment. The program includes four main components: (1) intensive initial language training, (2) work practice...