Learning about job search: A field experiment with job seekers in Germany
By Steffen Altmann, Armin Falk, Simon Jäger, Florian Zimmermann. Journal of Public Economics, 2015
119 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We conduct a large-scale field experiment in the German labor market to investigate how information provision affects job seekers' employment prospects and labor market outcomes. Individuals assigned to the treatment group of our experiment received a brochure that informed them about job search strategies and the consequences of unemployment, and motivated them to actively look for new employment. We study the causal impact of the brochure by comparing labor market outcomes of treated and untreated job seekers in administrative data containing comprehensive information on individuals' employment status and earnings. While our treatment yields overall positive effects, these tend to be concentrated among job seekers who are at risk of being unemployed for an extended period of time. Specifically, the treatment effects in our overall sample are moderately positive but mostly insignificant. At the same time, we do observe pronounced and statistically significant effects for individuals who exhibit an increased risk of long-term unemployment. For this group, the brochure increases employment and earnings in the year after the intervention by roughly 4%. Given the low cost of the intervention, our findings indicate that targeted information provision can be a highly effective policy tool in the labor market.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e89f27d42dfc97247c8e7fe6998c62c5825e642e
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Citations in the corpus
- Behavioural science and policy: where are we now and where are we going? (2018, background): “Similarly, one can infer long-term effects of behavioural interventions that reduce short-term unemployment (such as Altmann et al., 2015) on the basis that they prevent ‘employment scarring’ – the tendency for one protracted spell of unemployment to lead to others, even if the first spell can be…”
- The Effects of Unemployment Insurance Benefits: New Evidence and Interpretation (2016, unknown): “For example, Altmann et al. (2015), conducted an experiment where they mailed a letter to a random group of UI entrants.”
- Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, unknown): “Labor and education economics Information provision experiments have been applied to study job search (Abebe et al., 2020; Altmann et al., 2018; Belot et al., 2018, 2019; Carranza et al., 2020; Franklin, 2017), social norms (Bursztyn et al., 2020b), educational aspirations (Lergetporer et al.,…”
- Job Seekers’ Perceptions and Employment Prospects: Heterogeneity, Duration Dependence, and Bias (2018, unknown): “(24)Altmann et al. [2015] show that updating in beliefs about job search outcomes is slow in an experimental context.”