Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP14284
Authors: Marcel Fafchamps; Girum Abebe; Michael Koelle; Simon Quinn
Abstract: We place young professionals into established firms to shadow middle managers. Using random assignment into program participation, we find positive average effects on wage employment, but no average effect on the likelihood of self-employment. We match individuals to firms using a deferred-acceptance algorithm, and show how this allows us to identify heterogeneous treatment effects by firm and intern characteristics. We find striking heterogeneity in self-employment effects, and show that some assignment mechanisms can substantially outperform random matching in generating employment and income effects. These results demonstrate the potential for matching algorithms to improve the design of field experiments.
Keywords: Field experiments; Management practices; Self-employment; Causal inference; Propensity score
JEL Codes: No JEL codes provided
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| matching process (C78) | identification of heterogeneous treatment effects (C21) |
| controlled assignment mechanism (C90) | selection bias (C24) |
| management placement program (M10) | wage employment (J31) |
| management placement program (M10) | likelihood of securing permanent wage jobs (J63) |
| management placement program (M10) | self-employment (L26) |
| assignment to high-management firms (G34) | self-employment (L26) |