From Skills to Jobs: The Impact of Training on Employment in Senegal
With Tenikue, M.
Labour markets in low- and middle-income countries are characterised by widespread informality, low productivity, and persistent barriers to formal employment, particularly among youth and women. This paper examines whether Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) improves labour market outcomes by equipping workers with market-relevant skills. We focus on Senegal, a country with a young and rapidly expanding labour force where informal employment remains pervasive. Combining nationally representative data from the 2023 Enquˆete Nationale sur l’Emploi au Sénégal (ENES) with a newly assembled geocoded registry of 849 TVET centres, we estimate the causal effects of TVET attendance on employment and informal employment using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits spatial variation in access to training institutions. We find that TVET attendance increases the probability of employment by nearly 40 percentage points and reduces the likelihood of informal employment by around 70 percentage points. Employment gains are larger for women than for men and are particularly pronounced among younger individuals, whereas reductions in informal employment are stronger for men. Distinguishing between diploma-awarding and non-diploma programmes further indicates that improvements in labour market formalisation are driven primarily by diploma-awarding TVET. At the same time, we find no robust evidence of comparable effects for non-diploma training. The results are robust across alternative specifications and population subgroups. Overall, our findings provide causal evidence that expanding access to high-quality, diploma-awarding vocational training can promote both employment and labour market formalisation in sub-Saharan Africa
Individual Attitudes towards Immigration in Aging Populations
With Irmen, A. & Litina, A.
CESifo Working Paper Series
This paper empirically uncovers the role of population aging as a novel determinant of societal attitudes towards immigration. In particular, we document that aging has a U-shaped effect on immigrant-related attitudes. This implies that whereas relatively "young" societies are not favorable towards immigrants, as societies "grow older," they tend to adopt more favorable attitudes towards immigrants. To test our hypothesis, we conduct a multilevel analysis using a sample of individuals who reside in 25 European OECD countries over the period 2002-2019. We proxy for "societal population aging" using a measure of country-level old-age dependency ratio, and we test its effect on various attitudes towards immigrants as derived from nine consecutive rounds of the European Social Survey. Our hypothesized mechanism accounting for this U-shaped effect builds on the acknowledgment that as societies grow older, the shrinking working population and the associated problems render the labor force participation of immigrants a lucrative option. Ultimately, the economic incentives to raise the inflow of immigrants trigger an indirect shift in immigrant-related attitudes. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we use an instrumental variable approach using the projected old-age dependency ratio as an instrument.