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

V. Joseph Hotz; Lixin Colin Xu; Marta Tienda; Avner Ahituv

doi:10.1162/003465302317411497

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

V. Joseph Hotz^1,2; Lixin Colin Xu³; Marta Tienda⁴; Avner Ahituv⁵

¹ National Bureau of Economic Research · ² University of California, Los Angeles · ³ World Bank · ⁴ Princeton University · ⁵ Hebrew College

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2002 open access

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 more-general 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.

DOI: 10.1162/003465302317411497
Volume: 84 (2)
Pages: 221-236
Language: en
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