Why teens do not benefit from work experience programs: Evidence from brother comparisons

Social scientists' research on the consequences of teenage employment suggests that government programs providing teenagers with work experience should have worked better than they have. One explanation is that the government failed to deliver an otherwise effective treatment. This article considers three alternative explanations. The first is that the apparent benefits of working during the teenage years are illusory, reflecting only unmeasured differences between teens who do and do not work. A second explanation is that the groups targeted by government programs, the disadvantaged, benefit less from working as teenagers. A third explanation asserts that program participants and working teens experience different benefits because they have different employment experiences. Using information on brother pairs, this article examines these issues. It determines that conventional analyses of the returns to teenage employment greatly overstate the benefits poor minority teenagers receive from working. Our results suggest that the mixed success of previous programs is not primarily due to poor implementation or government involvement per se. Rather, these programs have had limited success because, for those teenagers targeted, work experience during the teenage years does not raise future earnings.