CREDIT Seminar: Mahreen Mahmud (University of Exeter)

This is an in-person event.

Title:  Wage subsidies to promote female hiring: Evidence from Pakistan (with Maurizio Bussolo, Jean Lee, Nayantara Sarma, and Anaise Williams)

Abstract: Pakistan has one of the lowest female labor force participation rates in the world. The firm-side constraints to hiring women are not well understood. We conduct a randomised control trial with around 1200 firms in Pakistan that have a job opening for a technical/professional role advertised on the country’s largest online job search portal. We offer a 6-month wage subsidy to a randomly selected half of the sample if they hire a woman for the advertised role. The subsidy offer is made via the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism and it reveals that the average subsidy level required by managers to hire a female is 15%. We find that wage subsidy offers lead to an 11 percentage point increase in the likelihood of a female being hired. These effects are particularly large for firms that only had male employees at baseline.