The Lifetime Impacts of the New Deal's Youth Employment Program.
Abstract
We study the lifetime effects of the first and largest American youth employment and training program in the United States-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 effects because they fail to capture lifetime effects and often ignore or underestimate health and longevity benefits that increase in magnitude at later ages.
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Research summary
The paper examines the long-term effects of a historical youth employment program on various health and longevity outcomes, which aligns with longevity research by exploring how early life interventions can influence lifespan and health status. However, while the findings are significant in understanding the broader impacts of employment programs on health and longevity, they do not directly address the root causes of aging or propose mechanisms for lifespan extension. Thus, it represents solid research but with limited impact on the field of longevity.
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