Abstract

In a field-experimental setting, we provide information to students about job opportunities and hourly wages of occupations they are interested in. The experiment takes place within a widely-used career orientation program in the Netherlands, and involves 28,186 pre-vocational secondary education students in 243 schools over two years. The information improves the accuracy of students' beliefs and leads them to change their preferred occupation to one with better labor market prospects. Administrative data covering up to four years shows that students who receive information choose (and remain in) post-secondary education programs with better job opportunities and higher hourly wages.

Abstract

Using data from the New York Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Expectations, we study how the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Situation Reports (Jobs Reports) affect individuals' expectations about the likelihood of losing their own job. We do this in two steps. First, we estimate the information shocks of the Jobs Reports on expectations about the development of the national unemployment rate in the next twelve months. We do this by comparing survey responses shortly before and after publication of the reports. Second, we estimate how these shocks affect individuals' expectations about losing their own job in the same time frame. The results show that when a report is estimated to increase beliefs about the likelihood of the unemployment rate increasing by 1 percentage point, beliefs about the likelihood of personal job loss during that time increase by up to 0.22 percentage points. We further find that the information shock negatively affects individuals' beliefs about the likelihood of finding a new job if they were to lose their current one, but (surprisingly) positively affects individuals' beliefs about the likelihood of voluntarily leaving their job. Our results are robust to the use of different bandwidths around the reports' publication dates and placebo treatments provide reassurance that the information shock is indeed the mechanism driving the result.

We study the impact of online information provision to unemployed job seekers who are looking for work in occupations in slack markets, i.e. with only few vacancies per job seeker. Job seekers received suggestions about suitable alternative occupations, and how the prospects of these alternatives compare to their current occupation of interest. Some additionally received a link to a motivational video. We evaluate the interventions using a randomized field experiment covering all eligible job seekers registered to search in the target occupations. The vast majority of treated job seekers open the message revealing the alternative suggestions. The motivational video is rarely watched. Effects on unemployed job seekers in structurally poor labor markets are large: their employment, hours of work and labor income all improve by 5% to 6% after 18 months. Additional survey evidence shows that treated job seekers find employment in more diverse occupations.

 We study the impact of published student satisfaction scores (ranging from 1 to 5) on enrollment of first-year students for the near universe of higher education programs in the Netherlands between 2011 and 2019. We use pageview data from the largest Dutch educational information website to determine each programs' closest substitutes. This allows us to not only analyze the impact of changes in a program's own published student satisfaction score, but also the impact of changes in the student satisfaction scores of its substitutes. We analyze the impact of these satisfaction scores using fixed effects Poisson regressions and exploit rounding discontinuities to identify causal effects. Our findings show that student satisfaction scores matter for enrollment. An increase in a program's student satisfaction score leads to higher levels of enrollment, whereas an increase in the student satisfaction scores of substitutes leads to lower levels of enrollment. Point estimates of the impact of a program's student satisfaction score being rounded up to the next tenth on first-year enrollment range between 1.70% and 3.52%, depending on the bandwidth around the threshold we consider. Conditional on being above the rounding threshold, a program being rounded up over at least one of its closest substitutes increases first-year enrollment by up to 4.37%.