The impact of manufacturing credentials on earnings and the probability of employment
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-15
Abstract
This paper examines the labor market returns to earning industry-certified credentials in the manufacturing sector. Specifically, we are interested in estimating the impact of a manufacturing credential on wages, probability of employment, and probability of employment specifically in the manufacturing sector post credential attainment. We link students who earned manufacturing credentials to their enrollment and completion records, and then further link them to their IRS tax records for earnings and employment (Form W2 and 1040) and to the American Community Survey and decennial census for demographic information. We present earnings trajectories for workers with credentials by type of credential, industry of employment, age, race and ethnicity, gender, and state. To obtain a more causal estimate of the impact of a credential on earnings, we implement a coarsened exact matching strategy to compare outcomes between otherwise similar people with and without a manufacturing credential. We find that the attainment of a manufacturing industry credential is associated with higher earnings and a higher likelihood of labor market participation when we compare attainers to a group of non-attainers who are otherwise similar.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
payroll,
earnings,
employ,
employed,
workforce,
matching,
occupation,
graduate,
associate,
earner
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Internal Revenue Service,
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Ordinary Least Squares,
Federal Reserve Bank,
University of Chicago,
Current Population Survey,
Employer Identification Numbers,
Journal of Labor Economics,
Journal of Human Resources,
North American Industry Classification System,
American Community Survey,
Social Security Number,
Business Register,
Protected Identification Key,
Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board,
Disclosure Review Board,
PIKed,
Center for Administrative Records Research,
Personally Identifiable Information
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'The impact of manufacturing credentials on earnings and the probability of employment' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperThe Gender Pay Gap and Its Determinants Across the Human Capital Distribution
June 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-31R
This paper links American Community Survey data and postsecondary transcript records to examine how the gender pay gap varies across the distribution of education credentials for a sample of 2003-2013 graduates. Although recent literature emphasizes gender inequality among the most-educated, we find a smaller gender pay gap at higher education levels. Field-of-degree and occupation effects explain most of the gap among top bachelor's graduates, while work hours and unobserved channels matter more for less-competitive bachelor's, associate, and certificate graduates. We develop a novel decomposition of the child penalty to examine the role of children in explaining these results.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperVirtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults
June 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-32
Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is no research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. We link statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from IRS records housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor's degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools. Although there is growing demand for virtual charter schools, our results suggest that students who enroll in virtual charters may face negative long-term consequences.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWho Scars the Easiest? College Quality and the Effects of Graduating into a Recession
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-47
Graduating from college into a recession is associated with earnings losses, but less is known about how these effects vary across colleges. Using restricted-use data from the National Survey of College Graduates, we study how the effects of graduating into worse economic conditions vary over college quality in the context of the Great Recession. We find that earnings losses are concentrated among graduates from relatively high-quality colleges. Key mechanisms include substitution out of the labor force and into graduate school, decreased graduate degree completion, and differences in the economic stability of fields of study between graduates of high- and low-quality colleges.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDoes Federally-Funded Job Training Work? Nonexperimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-02
We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive training. In addition to the usual impacts on earnings and employment, we link our state data to the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the US Census Bureau, which allows us to estimate impacts on the characteristics of the firms at which participants find employment. We find moderate positive impacts on employment, earnings and desirable firm characteristics for adults, but not for dislocated workers. Our primary methodological contribution consists of assessing the value of the additional conditioning information provided by the LEHD relative to the data available in state Unemployment Insurance (UI) earnings records. We find that value to be zero.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperUniversal Preschool Lottery Admissions and Its Effects on Long-Run Earnings and Outcomes
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-09
We use an admissions lottery to estimate the effect of a universal (non-means tested) preschool program on students' long-run earnings, income, marital status, fertility and geographic mobility. We observe long-run outcomes by linking both admitted and non-admitted individuals to confidential administrative data including tax records. Funding for this preschool program comes from an Indigenous organization, which grants Indigenous students admissions preference and free tuition. We find treated children have between 5 to 6 percent higher earnings as young adults. The results are strongest for individuals from the lower half of the household income distribution in childhood. Likely mechanisms include high-quality teachers and curriculum.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperSchool Discipline and Racial Disparities in Early Adulthood
June 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-14
Despite interest in the role of school discipline in the creation of racial inequality, previous research has been unable to identify how students who receive suspensions in school differ from unsuspended classmates on key young adult outcomes. We utilize novel data to document the links between high school discipline and important young adult outcomes related to criminal justice contact, social safety net program participation, post-secondary education, and the labor market. We show that the link between school discipline and young adult outcomes tends to be stronger for Black students than for White students, and that inequality in exposure to school discipline accounts for approximately 30 percent of the Black-White disparities in young adult criminal justice outcomes and SNAP receipt.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperComparing Earnings Outcome Differences Between All Graduates and Title IV Graduates
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-19
Recently, two public data products have been released that publish earnings outcomes for college graduates by program of study and institution: Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes and College Scorecard, from the Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Education, respectively. While the earnings data underlying the data products is similar, persons eligible for the frames of the two products is different, with College Scorecard restricted to only students that receive Title IV aid. This paper documents how these differences in the population studied affect the published earnings outcomes. I show that at an institution, of the institutions in my sample, an average of sixty percent of baccalaureate graduates receive Title IV aid, and that the lower the coverage, the large the difference in earnings measurement. Additionally, I show that short-run earnings outcomes are very similar for these two samples, while longer-run outcomes (10 years after graduation) are significantly lower for the Title IV population. I also show that program ranking can change significantly when considering the Title IV population rather than the entire graduate population.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperConsequences of Eviction for Parenting and Non-parenting College Students
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-35
Amidst rising and increasingly unaffordable rents, 7.6 million people are threatened with eviction each year across the United States'and eviction rates are twice as high for renters with children. One important and neglected population who may experience unique levels of housing insecurity is college students, especially given that one in five college students are parents. In this study, we link 11.9 million student records to eviction filings from housing courts, demographic characteristics reported in decennial census and survey data, incomes reported on tax returns by students and their parents, and dates of birth and death from the Social Security Administration. Parenting students are more likely than non-parenting students to identify as female (62.81% vs. 55.94%) and Black (19.66% vs. 14.30%), be over 30 years old (42.73% vs. 20.25%), and have parents with lower household incomes ($100,000 vs. $140,000). Parenting students threatened with eviction (i.e., had an eviction filed against them) are much more likely than non-threatened parenting students to identify as female (81.18% vs. 62.81%) and Black (56.84% vs. 19.66%). In models adjusted for individual and institutional characteristics, we find that being threatened with an eviction was significantly associated with reduced likelihood of degree completion, reduced post-enrollment income, reduced likelihood of being married post-enrollment, and increased post-enrollment mortality. Among parenting students, 38.38% (95% confidence interval (CI): 32.50-44.26%) of non-threatened students completed a bachelor's degree compared to just 15.36% (CI: 11.61-19.11%) of students threatened with eviction. Our findings highlight the long-term economic and health impacts of housing insecurity during college, especially for parenting students. Housing stability for parenting students may have substantial multigenerational benefits for economic mobility and population health.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDiversity and Labor Market Outcomes in the Economics Profession
July 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-26
While the lack of gender and racial diversity in economics in academia (for students and professors) is well-established, less is known about the overall placement and earnings of economists by gender and race. Understanding demand-side factors is important, as improvements in the supply side by diversifying the pipeline alone may not be enough to improve equity in the profession. Using the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) linked to Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) jobs data, we examine placements and earnings for economists working in the U.S. after receiving a PhD by gender and race. We find enormous dispersion in pay for economists within and across sectors that grows over time. Female PhD economists earn about 12 percent less than their male colleagues on average; Black PhD economists earn about 15 percent less than their white counterparts on average; and overall underrepresented minority PhD economists earn about 8 percent less than their white counterparts. These pay disparities are attenuated in some sectors and when controlling for rank of PhD granting institution and employer.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperImpact Investing and Worker Outcomes
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-30
Impact investors claim to distinguish themselves from traditional venture capital and growth equity investors by also pursuing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives. Whether they successfully do so in practice is unclear. We use confidential Census Bureau microdata to assess worker outcomes across portfolio companies. Impact investors are more likely than other private equity firms to fund businesses in economically disadvantaged areas, and the performance of these companies lags behind those held by traditional private investors. We show that post-funding impact-backed firms are more likely to hire minorities, unskilled workers, and individuals with lower historical earnings, perhaps reflecting the higher representation of minorities in top positions. They also allocate wage increases more favorably to minorities and rank-and-file workers than VC-backed firms. Our results are consistent with impact investors and their portfolio companies acting according to non-pecuniary social goals and thus are not consistent with mere window dressing or cosmetic changes.View Full Paper PDF
