Impact of PES firm-targeted prospection and employment services

The primary experiment estimates the impact of having a PES caseworker (i) promote PES services to employers and (ii) assist them with all their follow-up needs. We will measure this impact on a range of indicators, including their willingness to engage with PES caseworkers, their demand for the proposed PES services, and their overall labor demand (number of new hires and their characteristics)

As part of our baseline, we also implemented a survey experiment. Prior to sending the online surveys to firms and doing follow-up calls to fill out the survey, the research team randomly assigned firms into four groups: three treatment groups that received additional information and details about one of the three main PES services (subsidized contracts program; subsidized training and screening services); a control group that only received the basic email and invitation to fill out the baseline survey.

2023-02-01

2023-11-15

Outcomes from PES Administrative Data :
*Type and intensity of contact with PES caseworkers
*Use of PES services: take-up of the main PES programs including subsidized training (FCE), wage subsidies (Idmaj & Tahfiz), and screening services.
*Number and type of job postings on the PES website.
*Number and characteristics of applicants for job descriptions posted by firms included in our sample. *
*Number and characteristics of hired workers for job descriptions posted by firms included in our sample.

Outcomes from Social Security Data (conditional on access) :
*Number of newly hired workers.
*Wages of newly hired workers.
*Characteristics of newly hired workers: age, gender, tenure in the formal sector.
*Share of newly hired workers that come from the PES pool (combining the two sources of data).

Endline Survey Outcomes (conditional on funding):
*Time spent and perceived challenges during the recruitment process.
*Subjective assessment of workers recruited via Anapec.
*Perception of the PES and its services.
*Knowledge about the PES services.
*Number and characteristics of hired workers (if administrative data is not made available)

Our primary experiment estimates the impact of having a PES caseworker (i) promote PES services to employers and (ii) assist them with all their follow-up needs. We randomly assigned firms in our samples to one of these (same-size) two groups:
*Treatment group: firms are actively being prospected and assisted by a PES caseworker.
*Control group: PES caseworkers don’t actively contact them but, if employers in this group contact the PES on their own initiative, they will still have access to all the PES services.

We will measure the impact of this intervention on a range of indicators, including their willingness to engage with PES caseworkers, their demand for the proposed PES services, and their overall labor demand (number of new hires and their characteristics). These indicators will be measured both via an endline survey and administrative data.

As part of our baseline, we also implemented a secondary survey experiment. 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, three of them received additioanl information about a specific PES program (subsidized wages; subsidized training and screening services) and a control group only received the basic invitation to answer our survey.

Not available

Our randomization for the survey experiment was done in Stata using the administrative data from the Moroccan PES. Our randomization for the main experiment was done in Stata using the sample of firms that responded to our baseline survey. All codes will be made public at publications.

Our research protocol is based on two orthogonal randomizations at the firm level.
For the survey experiment, we randomize the information firms received about one of the PES services. For the main intervention, we randomize the follow-up calls with PES caseworkers at the firm level among the ones that responded to our baseline survey. 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.
For our secondary experiment, we also run the randomization on a computer. We randomized our secondary intervention at the firm level and stratified along the two following dimensions: (i) size of firms; (ii) sector of activity.

No

The design is not clustered.

8,000 firms

4,000 firms in the treatment group and 4,000 in the control group for the main experiment.

For the following power calculations, we define the treatment as having a caseworker that actively follows up with the firm to propose the full suite of Anapec services and assist them with the requested services, and we report the minimum detectable effect (MDE). We do not assume outcomes are standardized, and our goal is to measure the average treatment effects of our interventions on these outcomes using our baseline survey as a reference. The MDEs are then reported in levels. Considering a significance level of α = 0.05 and a statistical power of 80%, we obtain an MDE of 0.0310 for the dummy of whether a firm reports a hiring need (equal to 6.2% of the outcome’s standard deviation) and MDE = 0.0306 for the dummy of whether they have a training need (= 6.2% of the outcome’ standard deviation). For reference, Crepon et al. (2022) studied a similar intervention in France and found an impact of 7.9% of standard deviations for their main outcome: the number of newly hired workers. 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. Outcomes: * Hiring need (0/1): MDE = 0.0310 (6.2% SD) * Training need (0/1): MDE = 0.0306 (6.2% SD) * Used PES as a recruitment channel in the past: 0.0278 (6.1% SD) * Number of PES services used in the past: 0.0387 (6.0% SD)