Experimental Design Details
Baseline survey: We collected baseline surveys by phone and email for a sample of about 8,000 firms. Questions were primarily taken from previous PES annual surveys, with slight modifications to align with the research objectives. The survey had three primary goals:
1) To collect baseline characteristics and contact information for the firms that will take part in the primary evaluation
2) To test how advertising different PES services in the survey impacts response rates and interest in learning more about the agency
3) To generate a snapshot of the recruitment and training needs of PES clients
Demand elicitation: Prior to sending the online surveys to firms and doing follow-up calls to help them fill out the survey, the research team randomly assigned firms into four groups:
*A control group: a group of firms that received the basic email and invitation to fill out the baseline survey.
*Three treatment groups: on top of the invitation to answer the survey, each group received additional information and details about one of the following PES services: subsidized contracts program; subsidized training program; or screening services. This information was repeated in the last module of our survey. It is thus read out loud by the surveyor when the survey is administered by phone.
After sharing this information, we asked firms in all groups if they would like to receive additional information about the services offered by Anapec.
Main Intervention: Following the baseline survey, we designed a randomized controlled trial in collaboration with the Moroccan PES. Our sample of interest includes all the employers that responded to our baseline survey, either by email or after our phone follow-up. The 8,000 employers in this target sample are then randomly divided into two groups:
*Treatment group: These firms are placed first on Anapec’s contact lists and receive access to an intensive e-prospection and follow-up assistance by caseworkers during the study period. Employers will first be contacted by PES caseworkers according to a standardized script corresponding to their typology. Following their conversation with caseworkers, employers that wish to benefit from Anapec's services will be accompanied so that they can access all the required services in a timely manner.
*Control group: These firms are placed last on Anapec’s contact list and are “sanctuarized” for about 6 months before PES caseworkers can contact them. They therefore will not receive access to the e-prospection and follow-up assistance during the study period.If some employers still spontaneously request PES services, they will have access to them.
Importantly, for our design we stratified by (i) the Anapec local agencies that will conduct the prospection and follow-up PES; (ii) a dummy variable equals to 1 if a firm reported an hiring need at baseline; (iii) a categorical variable indicating whether the firm had contact with the Moroccan PES in the last two years; are at risk of being contacted after the start of the intervention because of PES administrative follow-ups; no recent contact and no risk of near future contact.
We implement the intervention by sharing lists of control and treatment firms with each local PES agency. We monitor the implementation with a mix of field visits and backchecks on administrative data.
1) Endline survey: Before the control group starts to be treated and conditional on funding, we will conduct an endline survey for all firms in the experiment. The first survey goal is to understand the number of workers hired by the firm, their characteristics (i.e. gender, age, skill level), as well as the objective characteristics and perceived quality of the newly hired workers. A second goal of the survey is to understand how firm recruitment and training processes work and potentially changed following the intervention, as well as their knowledge and satisfaction levels of Anapec e-prospection and PES services.
2) Administrative outcomes: In terms of administrative data that will allow us to track firms over time, conditional on approval, we hope to use:
PES Administrative Data: We will use our partner's internal administrative data to understand intermediate process outcomes: caseworkers' compliance to the protocol (i.e., whether treatment firms are provided with the prospection services), the types of PES services that firms take up, the number and types of job ads posted on the PES portal, the number and types of workers hired directly through the Moroccan PES.
3) Social Security Data: We plan to request data from the Caisse Nationale de Sécurité Sociale (CNSS) for access to social security declarations for the 8,000 firms in the experiment. This will allow us to understand very basic characteristics of firm hiring during the course of the experiment: the total number of workers, their basic demographic characteristics, their type of contract, their wages, and the length of their job spell.