Public Sector Hiring and Labor Market Flows of Indian College Graduates
Grants to Support Faculty Fellows' Research
This project explores the relationship between public sector hiring and the labor market flows of young college graduates in India. Public sector jobs are highly valued by college graduates and are allocated through extremely competitive examinations. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the high level of competition often motivates graduates to forego labor market earnings to prepare for these exams. We propose building a state-level database of hiring announcements for prestigious civil service jobs with wide eligibility requirements to assess the impacts of these announcements on the labor market behavior of young college graduates. Using multiple research designs and large-scale household surveys, we investigate whether these hiring announcements affect the labor supply of young graduates, inducing churn in the labor market, and its consequences for their labor market trajectories.
