School-to-Work Transitions and Related Public Policies : Evidence from Field Experiments in France.

Summary This dissertation focuses on school-to-work transitions and related labor market policies, particularly for troubled youth. Based on field experiments conducted in France in 2018 and 2019, it includes three chapters that add new empirical evidence to the economic literature.The first chapter provides new evidence on the strong job insertion of apprentices. It shows that the success of apprenticeship does not rely, in the French context, on better access to employment for those who do not remain in their training company. The expansion of apprenticeship thus has very limited effects on youth unemployment if it is not accompanied by an increase in retention in the training company.The second chapter contributes to a better understanding of employers' preferences regarding the profiles of young school dropouts. It shows that dropouts who have been inactive for more than two years are much less likely to be recalled for employment than high school graduates. Subsidized employment and job training increase dropouts' chances, but their chances still remain low. Only the combination of these two policies allows dropouts to catch up with those who did not drop out of school, reducing the negative signals associated with dropping out of school and length of time out of the labor force.The third chapter presents a field experiment to analyze the effectiveness of SMS messages sent to direct youth who are neither in employment nor in training to public support structures. All SMS messages were individualized and included specific information about these structures. The results indicate that the texts did not have a significant effect on the likelihood of referring to these facilities. These results show that texting this population is not an effective strategy to direct them more easily to a public assistance solution.The main argument of this thesis, therefore, is to bridge the gaps between schools and businesses so that a significant proportion of youth can avoid a non-employment situation as their first experience in the labor market.