We evaluate the effects of high school exit exams on high school graduation, incarceration, employment and wages. We construct a state/graduation-cohort dataset using the Current Population Survey, Census and information on exit exams. We find relatively modest effects of high school exit exams...

We address the ordinality of test scores by rescaling them by the average eventual educational attainment of students with a given test score in a given grade. We show that measurement error in test scores causes this approach to underestimate the black-white test score gap and use an...

Although both economists and psychometricians typically treat them as interval scales, test scores are reported using ordinal scales. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey, we examine the effect of order-preserving scale transformations...

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...

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 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...