Wage Effects of Recruitment Methods: The Case of the Italian Social Service Sector

This essay analyzes the role of different recruitment channels, and of informal networks in particular, on wage structures across various organization types in the Italian social service sector. While the impact of recruitment methods on wages has been addressed in several previous contributions, none of them focuses on social services. Comparison of outcomes across organization types within the same sector is in itself another novelty, as compared to previous studies that generally focus on differences across sectors or, more recently, across countries. The main findings are that nonprofit organizations prefer informal recruitment methods to better select the most motivated workers, namely those workers who share the nonprofit mission. Furthermore the impact of informal contacts on the wage structure explains much of the unobserved wage differentials across organization type. © 2009 Physica-Verlag Heidelberg

The wage effects from the use of personal contacts as hiring channels

Published as: Antoninis, M. The wage effects from the use of personal contacts as hiring channels, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 59 (1), pp.133-146, 200

Skills Development and International Development Agenda Setting: Lessons from an Intervention in Northern Nigeria

Skills development remains on the international development agenda but fails to get adequate attention. Based on prolonged fieldwork with a particularly marginalised community of children and young adults in the northern Nigerian state of Kano, this article shows how in contexts of extreme poverty the demand for skills training can supersede that for basic education. Further, by drawing on results of a six-month-long skills-training intervention, the article documents the scope for increased experimentation in the delivery of low-cost community-based skills-training programmes and identifies factors that influence programme completion. It also demonstrates that participation in skills-training programmes can dramatically increase entrepreneurial aspirations among marginalised youth; but that without access to credit most fail to pursue their aspirations. Below certain poverty thresholds, the dire resource constraints make change in aspirations an unreliable predictor of possible improvement in future outcomes