Education for Sustainable Job Creation

Research has found that jobs for poor people can provide a direct route out of poverty and job creation is thus key to achieving several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, many jobs in developing countries do not offer decent wages and working conditions that can sustain a path of productivity growth and poverty reduction. Poor management practices, including bullying and sexual harassment, have been identified as important determinants of the workplace climate, not the least for women.However, also supply-side constraints, those of the employee, may be important for sustainable job creation: workers may lack both the technical skills and the soft skills necessary to be attractive for an employer and to hold on to a job. Providing job seekers with relevant information and skills can thus be crucial for creating a productive match between worker and firm. In this project, we address the issue of sustainable job creation from both the employer and the employee perspectives and investigate potential complementarities between the two. We do so by using an experimental approach, where we offer a work training program to job seekers and measure outcomes both in a lab and in a field setting. Moreover we experimentally vary the management strategies according to key characteristics (payment structure, leadership style) in a lab setting. This allows us to dig deeper into the various dimensions of management: for instance, how important is soft incentives, such as recognition, relative to a wage bonus for increasing productivity and quality of work? Higher productivity and higher quality of work will make it more attractive to hire more workers and therefore contribute to more decent jobs.

Jobs can provide a direct route out of poverty and job creation is thus key to achieving several of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, research shows that many jobs do not offer wage and working conditions that can sustain a path of productivity growth and poverty reduction. Poor management practices, including bullying and sexual harassment, have been identified as important determinants of the workplace climate, not the least for women (Alan, Corekcioglu, Sutter, 2022; Folke and Rickne, 2022). However, also supply-side constraints, those of the employee, may be important for sustainable job creation: workers may lack both the technical skills and the soft skills necessary to be attractive for an employer and to hold on to a job (Blattman and Dercon, 2018). Providing job seekers with relevant information and skills can thus be crucial for creating a productive match between worker and firm. In this project, we address the issue of sustainable job creation from both the employer and the employee perspectives and investigate potential complementarities between the two. We do so by using an experimental approach, where we offer a work training program to job seekers and measure outcomes both in a lab and in a field setting. Moreover, inspired by Ariely, Kamenica and Prelec (2008), we experimentally vary the management strategies according to key characteristics (payment structure, leadership style) in a lab setting. This allows us to dig deeper into the various dimensions of management: for instance, how important is soft incentives (recognition) relative to a wage bonus for increasing productivity and quality of work? Our sample will consist of around 400 secondary school students in Tanzania who have just completed their education and therefore (most likely) are about to enter the job market. A fundamental contribution of our project is that we combine the experiment with lab and field evidence. We follow the participants over time, collecting lab evidence on mindsets and beliefs and field evidence of both job search and early job experiences. In this way, using both the lab and the field, our project allows us to both get a profound understanding of the psychological mechanisms of job search and career choice, as well as evidence on choices outside the lab setting, thus adding external validity to our study.