Increasing Employment Through the Partial Release of Information

CSkills and ability affect the likelihood of a worker getting hired. We ask if keeping these attributes fixed, can we increase employment by changing the information employers receive about potential workers. We use labora- tory experiments with subjects as employers and agencies to test how differ- ent market designs can result in different information being released about workers which in turn affects the number hired. We find that full informa- tion about workers leads to high employer profits. Revealing coarser and not necessarily verifiable information about workers increases employment albeit at the expense of the employersO profits and average skill of workers employed.