Are There Returns to the Wages of Young Men from Working While in School?

This paper examines the impacts of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men's wage rates during the 1980s and 1990s. Previous studies have found evidence of sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high school, on subsequent wage growth. Such findings may represent causal effects of having acquired work experience while still enrolled in school, but they may also be the result of failure to fully account for individual differences in young adults' capacities to acquire such skills and be productive in the work force later in life. We re-examine the robustness of previous attempts to control for unobserved heterogeneity and selectivity. We explore more general methods for dealing with dynamic forms of selection by explicitly modeling the educational and work choices of young men from age 13 through their late twenties. Using data on young men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we find that the estimated returns to working while in high school or college are dramatically diminished in magnitude and statistical significance when one uses these dynamic selection methods. As such, our results indicate a decided lack of robustness to the inference about the effects of working while in school that has been drawn from previous work.

Employment, Motherhood, and School Continuation Decisions of Young White, Black, and Hispanic Women

We examine the empirical relationship between early employment activity and school continuation decisions for young American women using a dynamic, sequential discrete-choice framework that estimates schooling, labor supply, and birth decisions jointly, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of these life cycle decisions. That the rate of school withdrawal increases as work intensity rises helps explain the higher departure rates of Hispanic girls from secondary school and the premature departure of young black women from college. The disturbing implication is that youth employment induces long-run wage stagnation for early school leavers and potentially increases race and ethnic inequities.

Are There Returns to the Wages of Young Men from Working While in School?

This paper examines the impacts of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men’s wage rates during the 1980s and 1990s. Previous studies have found evidence of sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high school, on subsequent wage growth; and that the return to such inschool work experience does not decline in age. Such findings may represent causal effects of having acquired work experience while still enrolled in school, but they may also be the result of failure to fully account for individual differences in young adults’ capacities to acquire such skills and be productive in the work force later in life. We re-examine the robustness of previous attempts to control for unobserved heterogeneity and selectivity. We explore more general methods for dealing with dynamic forms of selection by explicitly modeling the educational and work choices of young men from age 13 through their late twenties. Using data on young men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, (NLSY79), we find that the estimated returns to working while in high school or college are dramatically diminished in magnitude and statistical significance when one uses these dynamic selection methods, and the return to in-school work experience dropped over time. As such, our results indicate a decided lack of robustness to the inference about the effects of working while in school that has been drawn from previous work

Employment and Wage Prospects of Black, White, and Hispanic Women: Evidence from the 1980s and Early 1990s

Since the mid-1970s, the U.S. experienced substantial changes in the industrial composition of employment and wages owing to energy price shocks, increased international competition, and technological change (Hyclak, 1996, Levy and Murnane, 1992). As the share of total manufacturing employment declined and service employment expanded in both absolute and relative terms, wage inequality increased, particularly between college and high school educated workers (Katz and Murphy, 1992; Danziger and Gottschalk, 1993; Rasell, Bluestone and Mishel, 1997). Furthermore, changes in the legal and institutional structure of U.S. labor markets, including a decline in the share of the labor force that is unionized and changes in the enforcement of affirmative action laws, constrained employment options for unskilled and semi-skilled workers (Freeman, 1993). There is growing evidence that the consequences of these macro-economic trends were not uniform among race/ethnic and age groups (Hotz, et. al., 1995; Bound and Freeman, 1992; Acs and Danziger, 1993; Blau and Kahn, 1997). For example, real wages declined more steeply for younger that older workers (Katz and Murphy, 1992; Bound and Johnson, 1992). Reversing a long-run trend, the black-white differentials in employment rates and market earnings widene

Are There Returns To The Wages Of Young Men From Working While In School?

This paper examines the effects of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men's wage rates. Previous studies have found sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high school, on subsequent wage growth. We evaluate the extent to which these estimates represent causal effects by assessing the robustness of prior findings to controls for unobserved heterogeneity and sample selectivity. We explore moregeneral econometric methods for dealing with the dynamic of selection and apply them to data on young men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). We find that the estimated returns to working while in high school or college are dramatically diminished in magnitude and are not statistically significant when one applies dynamic selection methods. © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

*This research was funded, in part, by the Russell Sage and Rockefeller Foundations. We wish to

earlier drafts of this paper and Jorge Menèndez for his research assistance. We especially wish to thank James Heckman for providing us with a version of the statistical software used in some of the empirical analyses conducted for this paper and Steve Cameron and George Yates for their assistance This paper examines the impacts of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men’s wage rates during the 1980s and 1990s. Previous studies have found evidence of sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high school, on subsequent wage growth. Such findings may represent causal effects of having acquired work experience while still enrolled in school, but they may also be the result of failure to fully account for individual differences in young adults ’ capacities to acquire such skills and be productive in the work force later in life. We re-examine the robustness of previous attempts to control for unobserved heterogeneity and selectivity. We explore more general methods for dealing with dynamic forms of selection by explicitly modeling the educational and work choices of young men from age 13 through their late twenties. Using data on young men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, (NLSY79), we find that th