Life skills, employability and training for disadvantaged youth: Evidence from a randomized evaluation design

By Pablo Ibarraran, Laura Ripani, Bibiana Taboada, J. M. Villa, B. García. Social Science Research Network, 2014

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents an impact evaluation of a revamped version of the Dominican Republic’s youth training program Juventud y Empleo. The paper analyzes the impact of the program on traditional labor market outcomes and on outcomes related to youth behavior and life style, expectations about the future and socio-emotional skills. In terms of labor market outcomes, the program has a positive impact on job formality for men of about 17 percent and there is also a seven percent increase in monthly earnings among those employed. However, there are no overall impacts on employment rates. Regarding non-labor market outcomes, the program reduces teenage pregnancy by five percentage points in the treatment group (about 45 percent), which is consistent with an overall increase in youth expectations about the future. The program also has a positive impact on non-cognitive skills as measured by three different scales. Scores improve between 0.08 and 0.16 standard deviations with the program. Although recent progress noted in the literature suggests that socio-emotional skills increase employability and quality of employment, the practical significance of the impacts is unclear, as there is only weak evidence that the life skills measures used are associated to better labor market performance. This is an area of growing interest and relevance that requires further research.JEL codesJ24, J64, O15, O17.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa601f24ecdec987bf3254c55b71ed553bd21a99

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

Jochen Kluve

In Economics and Econometrics

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

Interventions to Improve the Labour Market Outcomes of Youth: A Systematic Review of Training, Entrepreneurship Promotion, Employment Services and Subsidized Employment Interventions (2017, background): “For example, young men that benefited from the programme Juventud y Empleo in the Dominican Republic saw an increase in formalization (written contract) coupled with an increase in duration (weeks) of unemployment and hours spent jobseeking on last working day (Ibarrarán et al., 2014).”
Employer Voices, Employer Demands, and Implications for Public Skills Development Policy (2014, unknown): “…Republic has been shown to increase leadership, conﬂict management, self-esteem, interpersonal skills (for some groups), organization skills, empathy, and hard work, in comparison to a randomly selected control group that did not receive the intervention (Vezza et al. 2014; Ibarraran et al. 2012).”
Promoting Women's Economic Empowerment: What Works? (2014, background): “The exception is a youth employment program in the Dominican Republic, which had a stronger impact on young men’s employment in formal sector jobs compared with young women’s but did reduce teen pregnancies among female trainees and increase their social and personal competencies (Ibarrarán et al. 2”
Do youth employment programs improve labor market outcomes? A quantitative review (2019, background): “These studies, for instance, range from experimental evaluations of prototypical skills training for highschool dropouts in the Dominican Republic (Ibarrarán et al. 2014), a wage subsidy pilot”
Location, search costs and youth unemployment: experimental evidence from transport subsidies (2018, unknown): “Finally, my findings contrast with the existing literature that has found weak impacts of other active labour market policies on youth outcomes, particularly in developing countries (Betcherman et al., 2004; Groh et al., 2012; Ibarraran et al., 2014).”