By reducing the commitment made by employers, fixed-term contracts can help low-skilled youth find a first job. However, the long-term impact of fixed-term contracts on these workers' careers may be negative. Using Spanish social security data, we analyze the impact of a large liberalization in...

Programs to encourage labor market activity among youth, including public employment programs and wage subsidies like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, can be supported by three broad rationales. They may: (1) provide contemporaneous income support to participants; (2) encourage work experience...

This paper reports the results from a randomized experiment designed to evaluate the direct and indirect (displacement) impacts of job placement assistance on the labor market outcomes of young, educated job seekers in France. We use a two-step design. In the first step, the proportions of job...

Recognizing that a credible estimate of a wage subsidy's impact requires a model of the labor market that itself generates high unemployment in equilibrium, we estimate a structural search model that incorporates both observed heterogeneity and measurement error in wages. Using the model to...

The need for school-to-work programs or other means of increasing early job market stability is predicated on the view that the chaotic' nature of youth labor markets in the U.S. is costly because workers drift from one job to another without developing skills, behavior, or other characteristics...

We assess the evidence on the contribution of changes in the population age structure to the changing fortunes of youths in labor markets in advanced economies over the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, and use this evidence to project the likely effects of future cohort sizes on youth labor...

Using a Cox proportional hazard model that allows for a flexible time dependence that can incorporate both seasonal and business cycle effects, we analyze the determinants of re-employment probabilities of young workers from 1978-1989. We find considerable changes in the chances of young workers...

This paper examines the magnitude of criminal activity among disadvantaged youths in the 1980s. It shows that a large proportion of youths who dropped out of high school, particularly black school dropouts, developed criminal records in the decade; and that those who were incarcerated in 1980 or...

This paper presents an analysis of the determinants of re-employment probabilities for young workers in the U.S. Using data from the new National Longitudinal Survey youth cohort a model is developed to analyze the transition probabilities from nonemployment to employment. The key factors...

This paper presents evidence that young unemployed job seekers choose higher levels of search effort (as measured by numbers of methods used and time spent per method) and lower relative reservation wages than do comparable employed seekers. The unemployed also have higher probabilities of...