Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits have a moral hazard effect and a liquidity effect, with both generating increases in unemployment spells but the latter increasing wages due to the ability to find better matches or better jobs. Previous papers, however, find mixed evidence on the impact of...

Youth unemployment in Latin America is exceptionally high, as much as 50% among the poor. Vocational training may be the best chance to help unemployed young people at the bottom of the income distribution. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized training program for disadvantaged youth...

We use administrative data and a randomization design to examine the long-term educational impacts of a large-scale vocational training program for disadvantaged youth in Colombia on trainees and their relatives. Up to eleven years after randomization, trainees were more likely to enroll in...

We randomly assign applicants to over-subscribed programs to study the effects of teaching hard and soft skills in vocational training and examine their impacts on skills and labor market outcomes using both survey and administrative data. We find that providing vocational training that either...

We follow the labor market outcomes of applicants who were randomized into job training a year and a half before the pandemic through the subsequent economic turmoil that resulted from COVID-19. Despite persistently improved labor market outcomes of training participants prior to March 2020, we...

We estimate the effect of immigrant flows on native employment in Western Europe, and then ask whether the employment consequences of immigration vary with institutions that affect labor market flexibility. Reduced flexibility may protect natives from immigrant competition in the near term, but...