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Seminar in Economics | An Adaptive Targeted Field Experiment: Job Search Assistance for Refugees in Jordan with Alex Teytelboym

Department of Economics welcomes you to a seminar with Alex Teytelboym, University of Oxford, presenting "An Adaptive Targeted Field Experiment: Job Search Assistance for Refugees in Jordan". We examine the impact of three interventions designed to improve formal employment outcomes of Syrian refugees and local jobseekers in Jordan: one treatment to address liquidity constraints, one to address information frictions, and one to address challenges of self-control. Our Tempered Thompson Algorithm balances the goals of maximizing the precision of treatment effect estimates and maximizing the welfare of experimental participants.

Welcome to this Higher Seminar in Economics organised by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Alexander Teytelboym, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Oxford. Alexander will present "An Adaptive Targeted Field Experiment: Job Search Assistance for Refugees in Jordan".

Abstract

We introduce a novel methodology for adaptive targeted experiments. Our Tempered Thompson Algorithm balances the goals of maximizing the precision of treatment effect estimates and maximizing the welfare of experimental participants. A hierarchical Bayesian model allows us to adaptively target treatments at different groups. We implement our methodology in a field experiment. We examine the impact of three interventions designed to improve formal employment outcomes of Syrian refugees and local jobseekers in Jordan: one treatment to address liquidity constraints, one to address information frictions, and one to address challenges of self-control. Six weeks after being offered treatment, none of the interventions has a significant or meaningful impact on the probability that individuals are in wage employment; we estimate that our targeting algorithm had a positive but small effect on aggregate employment (approximately 1 percentage point). However, we find large employment effects of all treatments for refugees at the two-month follow-up, and suggestive evidence of four-month impacts for the cash grant; liquidity appears to be a key barrier to employment for refugees.

Alexander Teytelboym is an Associate Professor at the Department of EconomicsUniversity of Oxford, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, and co-founder of Refugees.AI.

Alexander's research interests lie in market design and the economics of networks (as well as their applications to environmental economics and energy markets).

This seminar takes place online via Zoom.

Please contact kristen.pendleton@hhs.se if you would like to attend the webinar or have other questions.

Dept. of Economics Labor International economics  Economics Seminar in economics