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the paper is about the Summer Youth Employment Program in New York City uh we have data from 2005 to 2008 and one
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of the nice things about the program is that applicants who apply get lotteri in
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to have access to a summer job this is great for research purposes because we can compare basically identical people
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uh one of whom happened to get access to a summer job and one of whom did not uh
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and we can follow them uh from the year that they participate or don't participate uh up through 2014 and we
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match the data from the Summer Youth Employment Program with tax data IRS administrative data uh and data from the
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a New York State uh Department of Corrections and Community Supervision we're able to see the outcomes both for
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earnings College enrollment incarceration and mortality for the Youth who participate and who do not
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so there's three rationals to have summer youth employment programs and many cities have these uh New York the
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one we analyzes the biggest one in the country um but the three rationals that people give one you want to give youth a
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leg up uh give them better access to jobs in the future uh the second one is that um you want to transfer money
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directly to youth in the year of the program so basically put money into the hands of low-income kids and the third
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is that you want to keep you out of trouble and putting them in a job uh might might help that so we analyze uh
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the data to see if we could answer is the program doing each of accomplishing each of these three goals and the
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takeaways are it certainly is transferring money to low-income youth because in the year of the program the
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people who get access to the jobs earn significantly more than people who don't
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so it's it's not as if the program is giving jobs to people who would have
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gotten jobs otherwise the second uh rationale that we're putting youth on a better path so that they can earn more
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money in the future we actually don't find any evidence of that in the 3 years
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following the program the youth earn a little bit less if they had participated in the program so we investigate that uh
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in a little greater detail because it was a little bit surprising to us um and basically we find that what what matters
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is what job they get placed in in the summer of the program because the job that they take in that summer that they
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get in that summer tends to be sticky they take similar jobs like that so the youth who end up being Camp counselors
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or working in daycare centers they tend to gravitate towards those kinds of jobs
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in the future and those jobs uh on average earn a little bit less than other jobs we find no evidence that the
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summer job lets them or uh helps them go to college at higher rates so we don't
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see any effect on College enrollment um but by the fourth year after the program
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they're earning the same as the people uh who did not participate um so we don't find great evidence on helping
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them uh earn more money later on but we find very strong effects uh on keeping the youth out of trouble and we actually
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find that the youth who get lottery into to participate are more likely to be alive in 2014 and less likely to be
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incarcerated in New York state prison so one of the most surprising things for us was uh the mortality and
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incarceration results because that was something that we were able to analyze because we had so many youth applying
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over the course of four years and we could follow them for a long time other papers that study similar programs
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hadn't been able to look at so many people for so long uh so we were particularly surprised about the
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mortality results that in essence the program saved about 20 lives per year over the four years that we studied um
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that turns out to be quite important when you think about is the program uh are the social costs of the program and
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the social benefits of the program how do how do we compare those uh because when you save lives there's lots of
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value uh social value that you're creating uh from the program the great thing about this
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project is that it is the real world uh the youth uh that these programs exist in New York City and and cities across
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the country and so the results of the paper I think help give a sense of of what the
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programs are actually achieving and maybe you know should they be expanded which groups should they Target in the
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paper we go through and show the mortality incarceration and earnings results for different subgroups maybe
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it's worth uh targeting the programs or trying to reach out to youth uh For Whom
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the benefits are are greater when people think about the summer youth employment programs that
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exist they often think that the main contribution of the programs is helping people get jobs uh one of the things
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that we find that's that was so surprising to us is that in fact a lot of the benefits acrew on these other
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dimensions of keeping youth out of trouble uh keep putting them on a safer path so they uh might have a different
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group of friends because they participated in the program and those friends might
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uh keep them out of trouble and and keep them alive uh and so thinking about all
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the ways in which the summer youth employment programs can help uh these youth is something that people policy
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makers and others should keep in mind one of the nice things about the uh data that we have to analyze is just how
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many people we're able to look at so we actually are following 200,000 Unique
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Individuals uh do submitting 300,000 applications some people apply in multiple years and having so much data
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allows us to talk about very rare outcomes like mortality which thankfully is quite low in this population but it
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allows us to make statistical uh claims about the lowering of the mortality risk
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from people who participate in the program we're following up on this paper with uh trying to better understand the
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incarceration results and uh merging in data on uh arrests and convictions in New York state to try to get a better
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sense of what's driving that effect there's also lots of other summer youth
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employment programs across the country and one of the things that's on the horizon is helping other cities identify
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the strengths and weaknesses of their programs by doing similar evaluations uh on what is happening to the youth that
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get to participate in in their City's Summer Youth Employment Program [Music]