Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Examining Barriers to Job Placement in Summer Youth Employment Programs

Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Examining Barriers to Job Placement in Summer Youth Employment Programs

By Alicia Sasser Modestino, Mindy Marks, and Hanna Hoover

Summer Youth Employment Programs have been shown to have significant impacts on youth outcomes such as reducing violent crime, increasing high school graduation, and boosting subsequent employment and wages. Much of this research is based on lotteries from oversubscribed programs. But what happens when jobs cannot be allocated using simple random assignment due to heterogeneous preferences of employers and youth participants? In this paper, the authors explore both a youth application and employer selection behavior to better understand youth labor market dynamics and document how the job matching process unfolds within a youth workforce development program.