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abstract

Using a randomized trial, we look at employment and earnings of a youth-training program in Brazil that uses arts- and theater-based pedagogic tools. The evidence we present shows youth benefit in the medium-term from economically large employment and earnings impacts. We find no systematic evidence of broad impacts on socio-emotional skills, although the program appears to develop some skills related to self-control. We also find some evidence to suggest that youth who have higher initial socio-emotional skills may benefit more from the program. We argue that the estimated labor market impacts are due to a combination of both skills formation and signaling of higher quality workers to employers.

6. Conclusions

This paper provides the first instance of a rigorous evaluation, based on a randomized trial, of an arts- and theatre-based employment-generation program for at-risk youth. As such, it adds to the evidence on the effectiveness of the toolkit of ALMPs that policymakers have to address youth (un-)employment. The findings show that the “Galpão model” can be an effective alternative to traditional pedagogic approaches to youth training. The evidence we present shows positive and significant effects for the probability of being employed and for conditional earnings, in the medium-term. Contrary to the evidence on almost all other youth training programs in LAC, the results show no impact on the formality of jobs. This may be due to both the fact that the Rio de Janeiro labor market was already highly formal, and to the fact that the Galpão program lacked a tool to promote formality, such as a structured internship program. Demand-driven component of youth training, such as internships, have been interpreted as one of the success factors in other ALMP programs in LAC (Urzúa and Puentes, 2010). This paper also contributes to the evidence on the importance of socio-emotional skills for labor market outcomes for youth. The estimates show no clear program impacts on aggregate measures of socio-emotional skills, such as those measured by the overall CPS and Grit test averages. However, there is evidence of a more circumspect impact on certain socio-emotional behaviors, including self-control, which are critical in determining hoy youth respond in situations of conflict. Although socio-emotional skills change markedly over one's lifetime, the evidence suggests that few of them can be changed in the short-run by ALMPs—at least for the age group corresponding to Galpão participants. This is consistent with the literature on the readiness to learn, which identifies different age windows in which different types of socio-emotional skills can be developed (Guerra et al., 2014). For the Galpão age group, many socio-emotional skills may already be difficult to change. And for those skills which continue to develop through early adulthood, such as self-control, it is reassuring to find that our psychological tests did pick up some impacts.