Educational upgrading and its consequences among welfare recipients : Empirical evidence from the Self-Sufficiency Project

For example, in the case of estimating the consequences of completing secondary school, the comparison group consists of high school dropouts who remained dropouts at the -2- end of the sample period.2 An important feature of this analysis is the availability of longitudinal data, which allows us to identify those individuals who increased their formal education over the sample period and those in [...] Finally, there has been a resurgence of interest in the determinants of long-term growth and greater emphasis on the importance of human capital in the creation of new knowledge and in the growth of living standards over time. [...] By the end of the three-year period of eligibility for the earnings supplement, the program/control group differences in employment, earnings, and welfare use were small. [...] The next section, “Accounting for Measurement Error in Educational Upgrading,” assesses the nature and extent of mismeasurement of educational attainment in the SSP data and proposes some methods for reducing the amount of measurement error. [...] In particular, the overall number of questions asked in the education model, the order of these questions, and the nature of questions closely related to those in Table 1 changed over the four surveys — in some cases significantly.