Volume 36, Number 4 (Fall) 2001
Pabilonia, Sandra Wulff. 2001. "Evidence on Youth Employment, Earnings, and Parental Transfers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997." Journal of Human Resources 36(4):795-822.
The employment behavior of youths under age 16 has been neglected in the literature. This paper uses data from the new National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to examine the employment and earning behavior of youths aged 12-16 as well as the cash transfers received from their parents. Nearly half the youths (47 percent) earned income in 1996. As youths age. the amount of money they control increases as earnings grow faster than allowances. Results also suggest that a negative relationship exists both between youth employment and parental allowances and between earnings and parental allowances for youths aged 14-16.
This research was completed while Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington. She is currently a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This paper is a re- vision of a paper presented at the NLSY97 Early Results Conference on November 18-19. 1999 at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington. D.C. The author is grateful to Elaina Rose, Paul LePore, Jennifer Ward-Batts, Larry Wu, and participants in the Labor/Development brown bag series at the University of Washington for their comments, and to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research. and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Program Evaluation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for their financial support of this paper. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning May 2002 through April 2005 from Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia at the Department of Economics, University of Washington, Box 353330, Seattle, WA 98195-3330. Pablionia_s@bls.gov
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X