Job Market Paper

Together in Search: Experimental Evidence from Coordinating Travel Among Women Job-Seekers in Urban India (with Smit Gade)

In many developing countries, barriers like safety concerns and traditional social norms limit women’s physical mobility. To navigate these barriers, women typically only travel with companions—which could limit their job search if the companions are unavailable. Coordinating travel with job-seeking women could help, but they may not know each other. We address this constraint in a field experiment in urban India. We match job-seeking women within neighborhoods and randomly vary whether they can coordinate their travel to factory interviews by scheduling them on the same date or on different dates. Matching and coordinating travel increases interview attendance by 85%. The effects are stronger for women who knew fewer women at baseline and reported feeling unsafe when traveling. The treatment also improves job search beyond the interview experiment: women are 78% more likely to visit prospective employers and make twice as many trips. We present evidence showing that the effects on interview attendance and job search are driven by women coordinating their travel with each other and that matching without coordination has no effects.

Media Coverage

Ideas of India Podcast World Bank Blog

Funding

Weiss Fund G2LM|LIC at IZA J-PAL GEA UCSC CLC SurveyCTO Research Grant UCSC Blum Center

Published and Working Papers

Going the Extra Mile: Farm Subsidies and Spatial Convergence in Agricultural Input Adoption (with Shilpa Aggarwal, Dahyeon Jeong, Naresh Kumar, David Sungho Park, Jonathan Robinson, and Alan Spearot)

(2023) Impacts of the COVID lockdown on household incomes: evidence from Punjab, India (with Anirban Sanyal, and Nirvikar Singh), Empirical Economics

(2022) God is in the Rain: The Impact of Rainfall-Induced Early Social Distancing on COVID-19 Outbreaks (with Ajay Shenoy, Bhavyaa Sharma, Guanghong Xu, Haedong Rho, and Kinpritma Sangha), Journal of Health Economics 81: 102575

Works in progress

Enhancing Women’s Employment Outcomes: Mitigating Travel Cost and Information Barriers in Employer-Provided Creches (with Achyuta Adhvaryu, Smit Gade, and Anant Nyshadham)
Full funding secured: Funded by BMGF Grand Challenges

Understanding Gendered Differences in Job Search Behavior: Evidence from Urban India (with David Sungho Park and Monica Shandal)
Pilot completed: Funded by Weiss Fund

The Girl on the Train: Effect of Delhi Metro Transit System on Women’s Employment (with Moumita Das)