Cournot seminar – Lore Vandewalle (KU Leuven, Geneva Graduate Institute)

Event details :

We are pleased to welcome to the next session of the BETA Cournot seminar organised with the support of the FSEG on Friday 27/11, at 02:00p.m.:

Lore Vandewalle (KU Leuven, Geneva Graduate Institute)

who will present her paper entitled

Hiring Women versus Hiring Men: Experimental Evidence on Workers and Firms in Bangladesh

Abstract:  Employment improves women’s welfare, but women’s labor force participation lags behind men’s globally and particularly in South Asia. In Bangladesh, 44% of women, compared to 84% of men, are in the labor force. Both supply- and demand-side factors may contribute to low rates of employment for women. We run an experiment to measure the effects of employment on women vs. men, and the effects of having a woman vs. a man as an employee on firms’ outcomes and owners’ attitudes towards hiring women. We recruit small retail businesses that are interested in expanding by adding an employee and ask them to identify two women and two men who they would be willing to hire. We randomly choose some businesses to receive subsidies towards the wages of a randomly selected candidate employee for 6 months. This randomization provides variation in whether shops have female employees, male employees, or no employees; it also provides variation in whether qualified women and men receive jobs. Initial take-up of the subsidized jobs is high for both men and women and persists throughout the six-month intervention period. Six months after the subsidies end, there are positive but imprecisely estimated effects on the probability that treated businesses have employees and on their profits, with no differences between businesses assigned to hire women and those assigned to hire men. For employees, the subsidized jobs increase the probability that women are employed for a wage and raise their skills across a range of technical and soft skills but appear to decrease men’s employment and to have no effect on men’s skills. The subsidies appear to have improved employers’ relative perceptions of women as employees, but there are no differences between employers who experienced a woman employee compared to those who experienced a male employee.

If you would like to meet Lore Vandewalle, please contact Quitterie Roquebert.