We study the lifetime effects of the first and largest American youth employment and training program in the U.S.—the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 1933–1942. We match newly digitized enrollee records to Census, World War II enlistment, Social Security, and death records. We find that longer service in the CCC led to improvements in height, health status, longevity, geographic mobility, and lifetime earnings but did not improve short-term labor market outcomes including employment and wages. We address potential selection into CCC duration using several approaches, most importantly two newly developed control function approaches that leverage unbiased estimates of the short-term effects of a randomized controlled trial of Job Corps (the modern version of the CCC). Our findings suggest that short- and medium-term evaluations of employment programs underestimate impacts because they fail to capture lifetime effects and often ignore or underestimate health and longevity benefits which increase in magnitude at later ages.

中文翻译：

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新政青年就业计划的终生影响


我们研究了美国第一个也是最大的美国青年就业和培训计划——平民保护团 (CCC)，1933 年至 1942 年的终生影响。我们将新数字化的登记者记录与人口普查、二战入伍、社会保障和死亡记录进行匹配。我们发现，在 CCC 服务的时间越长，身高、健康状况、寿命、地域流动性和终生收入都会得到改善，但并没有改善包括就业和工资在内的短期劳动力市场结果。我们使用多种方法来解决 CCC 持续时间的潜在选择，最重要的是两种新开发的控制函数方法，这些方法利用了 Job Corps（现代版本的 CCC）随机对照试验的短期影响的无偏估计。我们的研究结果表明，对就业计划的短期和中期评估低估了影响，因为它们无法捕捉终生影响，并且经常忽视或低估健康和长寿的好处，而这些好处在以后的年龄会增加。