The Effects of Nudging Summer Youth Employment Program Applicants to Apply to More Jobs

Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEP) have been shown to have significant impacts on youth outcomes such as reducing violent crime, increasing high school graduation, and boosting subsequent employment and wages. Much of this research is based on lotteries from oversubscribed programs. However, many cities find that it is not feasible to allocate youth to jobs using simple random assignment due to heterogeneous preferences from employers and youth participants. This is because the matching process is more complex so that the program needs to balance both youth and employer interests to ensure participation. Even when random assignment is used, two issues arise that may lead to inequitable outcomes. First some SYEPs conduct random assignment at the employer level as opposed to the program level and our prior research shows that this can harm BIPOC applicants when the distribution of applications to position is imbalanced by race. In addition, this racial inequity may be exacerbated if there is an imbalance between the number of applicants and the number of openings across employers (e.g., some jobs are over- versus under-subscribed), such that youth and/or employers may not get their first choice. Our prior research documents that in the extreme, where over half of youth apply to only one job, this labor market mismatch across applicants and jobs means that no match can be made for a significant fraction of youth.

To help address this problem, we propose an RCT where we test the effectiveness of an informational treatment to improve job application behavior among youth by giving them salient information about the successful applicants and helping them to reflect about their job search. Each week, we will randomize youth who have applied to less than three positions into a treatment and a control group, stratified by availability of text and parent email. The treatment group will receive an email and/or text message nudging them to apply to more jobs along with salient information about the success rate of applicants from the prior year. The control group will not receive any nudging communication. If the sample size is sufficient, we will further subdivide the treatment group with one arm receiving a subsequent 'reflection' treatment in the form of an optional Qualtrics survey to help youth identify which job positions meet their specified criteria from the remaining positions which are still seeking job candidates.