High school students' summer jobs and their ensuing labour market achievement

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.