The PhD Economics Seminar: Every Thursday at 12:30 pm.
Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm
Date: 12th of April 2018
Place: Room 3001.
Aicha Ben Dhia (MIT) – “Improving vocational training for jobseekers: the impact of information and competition on training provider effectiveness.” joint with Louise Paul-Delvaux (Harvard)

Abstract: Overall unemployment in France is above 9.5% with unskilled and young workers experiencing unemployment rates as high as 20%. To address this issue, the French government is planning to invest 15billions euros in the next 4 years to subsidize job training for jobseekers with policies to encourage high quality training providers. Yet, evidence of the efficiency and cost-benefit value of these programs in OECD countries is at best limited and little work has been done to identify effective policies to raise quality on the provider side. In this project, we first plan to estimate the relative quality of training providers using value-added methods and relate these measures to providers’ characteristics. For this talk, we will primarily seek feedback on the design of a randomized experiment where we leverage this statistical information as well as survey results to improve jobseekers’ allocation to providers.