Did the Great Depression affect Educational Attainment in the US?

Type Journal Article - Economics Bulletin
Title Did the Great Depression affect Educational Attainment in the US?
Author(s)
Volume 9
Issue 30
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2008
Page numbers 1-10
URL http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1205543
Abstract
This paper examines how involuntarily-formed social networks affect individual labor market outcomes. Using a new dataset of WWI draftees linked to the 1930 census, I identify the effect of a military company's postwar employment on a veteran's employment. The marginal effect of an additional peer gaining employment, all else equal, increases a veteran's likelihood of employment by 0.8 percentage points. I develop a new framework which allows for decomposing the social effect into its two components, the endogenous ("the effect of others' outcomes"), and the contextual ("the effect of others' characteristics"). In this setting, I find the endogenous effect to be much stronger.

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