Volume 30, Number 3 (Summer) 1995
Light, Audrey. 1995. "The Effects of Interrupted Schooling on Wages." Journal of Human Resources 30(3):472-502.
Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth reveal that 35 percent of white men who leave school between 1979 and 1988 return to school by 1989. This paper examines the wage effects of these nontraditional enrollment patterns. I estimate a wage model which allows individuals to follow a different wage path before and after their reenrollment and an alternative model which does not account for school and work discontinuities. I find that young men who delay their schooling receive wage boosts that are smaller than those received by their continuously schooled counterparts. Wage models that fail to account for "delayed" schooling tend to understate the returns to schooling received prior to the start of the career.
Audrey Light is a research scientist at the Center for Human Resource research and an adjunct assistant professor of economics at the Ohio State University. Helpful comments were received from Joseph Altonji, James N. Brown, Robert Kaestner, Finis Welch, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the Hoover Institution, Ohio State, and SUNY Stony Brook. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in December 1995 through December 1998 from the author: Department of Economics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210.
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