The 1994 Federal School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) provided more than $1.5 billion over five years to support increased career preparation activities in the country's public schools. However, the STWOA was not re-authorized, so state governments face decisions about levels of funding...

The impending retirement of the baby boom cohort represents the first time in the history of the United States that such a large and well-educated group of workers will exit the labor force. This could imply skill shortages in the U.S. economy. We develop near-term labor force projections of the...

We review studies of the impact of credit constraints on the accumulation of human capital. Evidence suggests that credit constraints are increasingly important for schooling and other aspects of households' behavior. We highlight the importance of early childhood investments, since their...

Shifts in the incidence of various types of training over the 1980s favored more-educated, more-experienced workers. Coupled with the fact that this training is associated with higher wages, these shifts suggest that training may have contributed to the growth of wage inequality in this period....

We study a set of programs implemented in Philadelphia high schools that focus on boosting post-secondary enrollment. These programs are less career oriented than traditional school-to-work programs, but are consistent with the broadening of the goals of school-to-work to emphasize...

We argue in this paper that the focus on employment effects in recent studies of minimum wages ignores an important interaction between schooling, employment, and the minimum wage. To study these linkages, we estimate a conditional logit model of employment and enrollment outcomes for teenagers...

Theory predicts that minimum wages will reduce employer-provided on-the-job training designed to improve workers' skills on the current job, but may increase the amount of training that workers obtain to qualify for a job. We estimate the effects of minimum wages on the amount of both types of...

This paper investigates the impact of wage subsidies on skill formulation. We analyze two prototypical models of skill formation: (a) a learning-by-doing model and (b) an on-the-job training model. We develop conditions on the pricing of jobs under which the two models are equivalent. In general...

This paper examines the consequences of initial periods of churning,' floundering about,' or mobility' in the labor market to help assess whether faster transitions to stable employment relationships--such as those envisioned by advocates of school-to-work programs--would be likely to lead to...

We examine evidence on omitted-ability bias in estimates of the economic return to schooling, using proxies for unobserved ability. We consider measurement error in these ability proxies and the potential endogeneity of both experience and schooling, and examine wages at labor market entry and...