The Demand for, and Impact of, Youth Internships
This paper evaluates a youth internship program in the Republic of Yemen that provided firms with a 50 percent subsidy to hire recent graduates of universities and vocational schools. The first round of the program took place in 2014 and required both firms and youth to apply for the program. The paper examines the demand for such a program, and finds that in the context of an economy facing substantial political and economic uncertainty, it appears there is an oversupply of graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and a relative undersupply of graduates in marketing and business. Conditional on the types of graduates firms were looking to hire as interns, applicants were then randomly chosen for the program. Receiving an internship resulted in an almost doubling of work experience in 2014, and a 73 percent increase in income during this period compared with the control group. A short-term follow-up survey conducted just as civil conflict was breaking out shows that internship recipients had better employment outcomes than the control group in the first five months after the program ended.
Summary: | This paper evaluates a youth internship
program in the Republic of Yemen that provided firms with a
50 percent subsidy to hire recent graduates of universities
and vocational schools. The first round of the program took
place in 2014 and required both firms and youth to apply for
the program. The paper examines the demand for such a
program, and finds that in the context of an economy facing
substantial political and economic uncertainty, it appears
there is an oversupply of graduates in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics, and a relative undersupply of
graduates in marketing and business. Conditional on the
types of graduates firms were looking to hire as interns,
applicants were then randomly chosen for the program.
Receiving an internship resulted in an almost doubling of
work experience in 2014, and a 73 percent increase in income
during this period compared with the control group. A
short-term follow-up survey conducted just as civil conflict
was breaking out shows that internship recipients had better
employment outcomes than the control group in the first five
months after the program ended. |
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