Are There Returns to the Wages of Young Men from Working While in School?
重新检验了在校期间工作对后续工资的影响，使用动态选择模型发现，之前研究估计的高回报在控制个体异质性和选择性后大幅降低，且随时间下降。
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\nhaving acquired work experience while still enrolled in school, but they may also be the result of\nfailure 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\nsignificance 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.