Intervention(s)
We collaborate with most woredas in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Each woreda Office of Labor and Skills implements a standardized labor market matching policy mandated by the Ministry of Labor and Skills. The policy aims to identify firm vacancies and unemployed jobseekers and to facilitate matches between the two. We focus on three core program components: (1) collecting vacancy information from firms, (2) referring jobseekers to these vacancies, and (3) verifying whether referred jobseekers are ultimately hired by the firms.
We will provide a digitized version of an existing checklist to all woredas – control and treatment. This digital checklist is focused on component (1): collecting vacancies from firms. In the status quo, bureaucrats fill out a pen-and-paper version of this checklist, which they later have to copy into excel for reporting purposes. The digital checklist simplifies this as data entered digitally is immediately exportable into an excel sheet that follows the existing format and reporting requirements. Both team leaders and ground-level bureaucrats (“experts”) have a personal login to the dashboard that highlights key information and allows for downloading of the excel sheet.
For a random subset of woredas, bureaucrats will also be provided with two new (digital) checklists. These checklists are focused on steps that are crucial to the policy’s goal, but which are not measured consistently. In the treated woredas, team leaders and experts will have access to an upgraded dashboard that allows tracking (2) which vacancies have jobseekers referred to them and (3) whether the referred jobseekers end up working at the firm.
July 2026 amendment: The proposed second intervention wave builds on the original random assignment described above. In the first intervention wave, all participating woredas received a list of eight assigned firms for team leaders and experts to visit. The 58 woredas assigned to the Wave 1 treatment arm are referred to here as the “Measurement” arm, because they received the digitized vacancy checklist as well as the additional digitized referral and placement checklists. The 52 woredas assigned to the Wave 1 control arm are referred to here as the “Digitization” arm, because they received the digitized vacancy checklist only.
In Wave 2, study woredas will receive a new list of eight assigned firms with current or future hiring needs, to the extent possible. Among the 58 woredas previously assigned to Measurement, approximately 29 will continue with Measurement Only and 29 will receive Measurement plus Incentives. Among the 52 woredas previously assigned to Digitization, approximately 26 will continue with Digitization Only and 26 will receive Digitization plus Incentives. The incentives will be tied to verified referral and hiring outcomes among the eight assigned firms, as determined by the research team using firm endline data. Payments will be made directly to the team leader.
Within each Digitization woreda, the eight assigned firms will then be randomly divided into two groups according to whether woreda officials use a digitized vacancy checklist or the standard paper checklist during the visit. In Digitization woredas without incentives, four firms in each woreda will be assigned to Pure Control (PC), for which woreda officials will use the standard paper checklist, and four firms will be assigned to Digitization Control (DC), for which officials will use a digitized vacancy checklist. In Digitization woredas with incentives, four firms in each woreda will be assigned to Incentives Only (IO), for which officials will use the standard paper checklist and team-leader incentives will apply. The remaining four firms will be assigned to Digitization and Incentives (DI), for which officials will use a digitized vacancy checklist and team-leader incentives will apply.
All eight assigned firms will remain equally part of the study, regardless of whether woreda officials use a digitized or paper checklist. To avoid suggesting that firms assigned to one checklist format are more important than others, team leaders will be informed that firms were randomly assigned to different checklist formats for research purposes. For firms assigned to the paper checklist condition, team leaders, not the responsible experts, will also be asked to collect and photograph the completed paper checklist and submit the photograph to the survey team.