combination of increased job search and more realistic expectations leads to considerably improved employment outcomes for low-type workers. By contrast, the fairs seem to be a discouraging experience for higher type workers, who learned that firms have high experience requirements for formal jobs. They do not adjust their reservation wages, and in fact lower their aspirations. They are less likely to have good jobs at endline, and more likely to have switched to self-employment.

This is the first experiment, to our knowledge, to try to study the effects of labour market matching programs on both workers and firms. A growing but relatively new literature looks at the effects of labour market interventions that aim to reduce information asymmetries on job search outcomes. The closest study to ours is Beam (2016), where workers are encouraged to attend a job fair in the Philippines geared towards placing workers in overseas jobs. The paper focusses on a remote rural sample of workers who were not necessarily actively looking for jobs in an urban labour market, and finds that the job fairs changed people’s perceptions of the labour market and encouraged job search in big cities (but had no effect on the probability of working overseas). Similarly Jensen (2012) finds that remote rural dwellers increase their employment when they are given information about available vacancies at nearby towns (see also Bassi and Nansamba (2017)).

Instead, we focus on a sample of active job-seekers who already know the labour market well. Our design is not intended to introduce workers to a new labour market or to motivate them to start looking for work. Rather, we aim to look at how lower barriers to talking to formal firms can improve workers’ chances of getting jobs, and update their information about the jobs they are already looking to get. Similar work focussing on information frictions in large labor markets includes Groh et al. (2015), who try to match workers and firms on the basis of observable characteristics. They are unable to get workers to take up offers for jobs and interviews, who seem to opt to remain unemployed to look for better work. Pallais (2014) shows how providing information about workers’ abilities, which they can credibly communicate to hiring firms, can improve their prospects in an online labour market.<sup>4</sup> Finally, Abebe et al. (2016) conduct two parallel field experiments on how to get job seekers into jobs. They find that improving job-seekers’ ability to engage in directed search through the existing channels increases their probability of finding a good job. In the second experiment, they find that improving job-seekers’ applications — with a certification programme based on detailed testing — also improves employment outcomes, by making job search more effective. We extend this literature not only by testing job fairs as a new kind of intervention to reduce information frictions, but also by studying both sides of the market. We collect data on the recruitment decisions of firms where our job seekers looked for work, and we estimate the

> 4 See also Horton (2017), who shows that algorithmic recommendations can increase hiring in the same online market. Stanton and Thomas (2015) shows that intermediaries in online markets can help workers and firms to overcome information asymmetries.

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