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Nomura, Shinsaku

Education Global Practice
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Last updated: November 11, 2024
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Shinsaku Nomura is a Senior Economist at the Education Global Practice in the World Bank. He has worked in countries in Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia regions. In South Asia, he has managed projects of basic and secondary education, early childhood education, and skills development in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. He has also led analytical projects such as big data labor market analytics, learning assessments, impact evaluations, and economic and financial analyses. He received a PhD in Economics from the Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies, Kobe University, Japan.

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2010 - 20192
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Country: Bangladesh ×

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    The Influence of Non-Cognitive Skills on Wages within and between Firms: Evidence from Bangladesh's Formal Sector
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05) Adhikari, Samik; Nomura, Shinsaku
    Many employers and employees believe that non-cognitive skills are an important contributor to labor market success. This study has assessed the empirical evidence for such a claim in the case of Bangladesh by evaluating unique employer-employee matched labor market data. The analysis is based on data collected from 6,981 workers in 500 formal sector firms in Bangladesh's five largest formal economic sectors. Using ordinary least squares and firm fixed-effect models, the study assesses correlations between wages and the so-called "big five" personality traits, and augments the analysis with the latent personality scores captured by the Rasch model. Comparing the ordinary least squares and fixed-effect models reveals statistically significant correlations between personality traits and wages, within and across firms. The results appear to indicate that non-cognitive skills are correlated with a worker's likelihood of achieving success in the labor market. Although many of the findings are consistent with the literature, the analysis reveals specific patterns that appear to be unique to Bangladesh, including a positive correlation between “emotional stability” and wages and a negative correlation between "grit" and wages, especially among manufacturing workers. Differences across firms could indicate that firms that offer higher wages may tend to attract workers with distinct types of non-cognitive skills, whereas differences within firms may indicate that variations in non-cognitive skills are associated with disparities in firm-level wage structures. Correlations between wages and personality traits are more prominent among large firms than among small or medium-sized firms.
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    Fast, Easy and Cheap Job Matching: Social Networks in Bangladesh
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06) Matsuda, Norihiko; Nomura, Shinsaku
    This paper uncovers the reason why social networks are used in a job market. The data are novel: a nationally representative matched employer-employee data set in Bangladesh with detailed information, including direct measures of the use of social networks. The empirical analysis shows that compared with those who used open channels to find jobs, the employees who used social networks found jobs more easily, have lower observable abilities, and achieved lower employment outcomes conditional on observable and unobservable abilities. These results are robust whether firm-occupation fixed effects are controlled for or not. By comparing these findings with theoretical predictions, the paper concludes that social networks play the role as fast and easy but narrow-spectrum matching. That is, social networks allow job seekers to find jobs quickly and easily and thereby reduce search costs, but the types of jobs available from social networks are narrower than those from open channels. As a consequence, those who choose to use social networks are more likely to end up having mismatched jobs, that is jobs in which they cannot take advantage of their specialties. In the context of developing countries, a considerable number of poor job seekers may use social networks out of necessity even if the returns to finding good-match jobs through open channels are sufficiently high.