The Lifetime Impacts of the New Deal's Youth Employment Program
Bibliographic record
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".