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High school student's summer jobs and their ensuing labour market achievement

Author: Iris J Y Wang, And Kenneth Carling , And Ola Nääs, And

Summary of Working paper 2006:14

This paper seeks to determine the effect of summer jobs offered by the public sector on high-school students’ labour market achievement by use of quasi-experimental data. Many municipalities in Sweden offer summer jobs within their organizations to high-school students. The municipality of Falun randomly allocates about 200 such summer jobs per year by a lottery. Because of this, the effect of a summer job might be determined while the issue of self-selection bias is controlled. Our study finds that summer jobs slightly improve the earnings immediately after graduation from high school, but the effect does not persist.
Keywords: intention-to-treat; on-treatment; Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test
JEL-code: C41, C93, J68

This paper seeks to determine the effect of summer jobs offered by the public sector on high-school students’ labour market achievement by use of quasi-experimental data. Many municipalities in Sweden offer summer jobs within their organizations to high-school students. The municipality of Falun randomly allocates about 200 such summer jobs per year by a lottery. Because of this, the effect of a summer job might be determined while the issue of self-selection bias is controlled. Our study finds that summer jobs slightly improve the earnings immediately after graduation from high school, but the effect does not persist.

Keywords: intention-to-treat; on-treatment; Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test
JEL-code: C41, C93, J68

Research areas