What Does a High School Diploma Get You? Employment, Race, and the Transition to Adulthood
We compare the employment of African American and white youth as they transition to adulthood from age 18 to 22, focusing on high school graduates and high school dropouts who did not attend college. Using OLS and hazard models, we analyze the relative employment rates, and employment consistency, stability, and timing, controlling for a number of factors including family income, academic aptitude, prior work experience, and neighborhood poverty. We find white high school graduates work significantly more than all other youth on most measures; African American high school graduates work as much and sometimes less than white high school dropouts; African American dropouts work significantly less than all other youth. Findings further suggest that the improved labor market participation associated with a high school diploma is higher over time for African Americans than for white youth.
It's got a kitchen-sink-regression feel to it, but I think it's interesting because we look at some outcomes you don't always see (like time to full time employment). And the findings are striking and important: black high school graduates do about as well as white drop-outs, and the difference between grads and drop outs is bigger for blacks than whites.
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We should be hearing back from our JEBO resubmission on payday loan use and other "alternative financial services" any day now. I'm awaiting the referees on my Notes and Records of the Royal Society paper. Otherwise I'm focused on making sure that my class papers this semester are written such that I can send them in somewhere without much additional work this winter (to some kind of policy analysis/labor journal for my econometrics paper and a household/family economics journal for my gender paper).
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Congratulations on your latest publication, Daniel Kuehn! Do you have any idea when your article will come out in published form, though?
ReplyDeleteWell as the editor made a point of telling us, this is "published".
DeleteSomething is very weird at the site, though. There should be a volume 39 with at least a couple issues. I could have sworn this spring I saw a special issue of volume 39 posted because I remember seeing an Urban Institute colleague with an introduction to the issue - but now her article is just in the "online first" section.
So hard to say - a few issues before it is assigned to a specific issue, probably.