Firms and Labor Markets : Essays in Development Economics

Matching with the Right Attitude: the Effect of Matching Firms with Refugee Workers We study the effect of contact in the workplace on firms' willingness to hire refugees and ultimately on refugees' labor market integration. We run an experiment in Uganda, where treated firms provide an internship of one week to a skilled refugee worker. We find that treated firms hire three times as many refugees than firms in the control group on the long run. Exposure to a refugee led firm managers to update their beliefs about refugees' skills in general. We find that positive matches, i.e., firms with a positive attitude toward refugees who were matched with a refugee with positive attitudes toward locals, resulted in a substantial increase in firms’ willingness to hire a refugee worker, while negative matches decrease firms’ willingness to hire. Our findings show that short-term exposure interventions can result in longer-term increases in employment for disadvantaged groups, but the size of this effect depends on the initial match quality. Can work contact improve social cohesion between refugees and locals? Evidence from an experiment in Uganda Does contact, through direct and indirect exposure in the workplace, promote social cohesion between refugees and natives? We answer to this question through an experiment with refugee and local workers in Uganda. We measure social cohesion through a compound measure incorporating attitudes, implicit and explicit biases and behaviors in real and hypothetical activities. We find that while implicit bias increases, explicit bias decreases for both groups, and behaviours towards the out-group are positive for both groups but differ slightly: natives want to have more refugee business partners and invest more in future businesses, while refugees want to work more for Ugandan firms and invest less in businesses of their own. Do Information Frictions Kill Competition? A Field Experiment On Public Procurement in Uganda We study whether infor