Journal of Labor Economics 43(3) , pp.885 - 935, 2025

Oriana Bandiera, Vittorio Bassi, Robin Burgess, Imran Rasul, Munshi Sulaiman and Anna Vitali

Published 1 July 2025

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There are 420 million young people in Africa today, and only one in three has a regular salaried job. We study how two common labor market interventions-vocational training and matching-affect the job search behavior of young workers. We do so by means of a field experiment tracking young job seekers for 6 years in Uganda's main cities. Vocational training amplifies the job seekers' initial optimism, leading them to search more intensively and toward high-quality firms. Adding matching has the opposite effect, plausibly because of low callback rates. These differences affect labor market outcomes in the long run.