The rigorous evidence on vocational training programs is, at best, mixed.   For example, Markus recently blogged about some work looking at long term impacts of job training in the Dominican Republic.   In that paper, the authors find no impact on overall employment, but they do find a change in the quality of employment, with more folks having jobs with health insurance (for example). We get similar results in a recent paper with Kevin Croke on a training intervention in Nigeria, but the “quality” of the job is where it gets interesting.   We set out to look at occupational sex segregation and how training might overcome it. Given what we heard from talking to firms and women during initial fieldwork, a big issue for us was to understand the pre-existing biases of the applicants themselves. In order to measure these biases, we turned to the implicit association test. A small but growing group of economists have used this tool from social psychology... — blog.wb.org/blogs