The Lifetime Impacts of the New Deal's Youth Employment Program

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Aizer, Anna; Early, Nancy; Eli, Shari; Imbens, Guido; Lee, Keyoung; Lleras-Muney, Adriana; Strand, Alexander
• 署名单位: Brown University; University of Toronto; Stanford University; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Philadelphia; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjae016
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 2579-2635
• 关键词: automated linking; long; population; childhood; mortality; policies; outcomes; TRENDS; income

摘要

We study the lifetime effects of the first and largest American youth employment and training program in the United States-the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 1933-1942. We match newly digitized enrollee records to census, World War II enlistment, Social Security, and death records. We find that longer service in the CCC led to improvements in height, health status, longevity, geographic mobility, and lifetime earnings but did not improve short-term labor market outcomes, including employment and wages. We address potential selection into CCC duration using several approaches, most importantly two newly developed control-function approaches that leverage unbiased estimates of the short-term effects of a randomized controlled trial of Job Corps (the modern version of the CCC). Our findings suggest that short- and medium-term evaluations of employment programs underestimate effects because they fail to capture lifetime effects and often ignore or underestimate health and longevity benefits that increase in magnitude at later ages.