The Benefits of Early Work Experience for School Dropouts : Evidence from a Field Experiment1

This paper investigates whether work experience gained through a subsidized job program can improve the employment prospects of young school dropouts. Relying on a correspondence study field experiment conducted in France, we find that the chances to be invited for a job interview are more than doubled (from 7.6 percent to 19.3 percent) when youths signal a one-year job-related experience in their r´esum´e – either in the private or public sector; either certified or not – compared to youths who remained mainly inactive after dropping out from high school. We show that this effect is fairly stable across firm, contract or labor market characteristics, and also when testing another channel of application where r´esum´es were sent spontaneously to firms. Our results contrast with the overall negative evidence about the effectiveness of subsidized employment programs in improving the employment prospects of disadvantaged youth