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Title: Male Prime-age Nonworkers: Evidence from the NLSY97
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Rothstein, Donna S.
Male Prime-age Nonworkers: Evidence from the NLSY97
Presented: Atlanta GA, American Economic Association Annual Meeting, January 2019
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: American Economic Association
Keyword(s): Labor Force Participation; Male Sample; Unemployment

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The labor force participation rate of prime-age men has been mostly falling since the late 1960s, with steeper declines during recessionary periods. This paper uses longitudinal data to examine whether men's prior trajectories of schooling, work, family, income, health, incarceration, and living situations differ between nonworkers and their working peers. It also investigates whether non-work status is a transitory state, and whether parents, spouses, partners, or others are providing support. The data in this paper are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), which contains detailed histories about individuals' lives across multiple domains. This allows one to drill down past top-level information about employment and schooling to create a more nuanced picture involving support systems, criminal behaviors, family formation, health, disability, and youth expectations regarding educational attainment and future employment. At the 2015-16 NLSY97 survey date about 9 percent of men, who range in age from 30 to 36, had not worked in the prior year. Most of these men had never married, about a third lived in a household with a parent, and almost 20 percent were incarcerated at the time of the interview. The vast majority of men who did not work in the year prior to the 2015-16 interview also did not work much in earlier years.
Bibliography Citation
Rothstein, Donna S. "Male Prime-age Nonworkers: Evidence from the NLSY97." Presented: Atlanta GA, American Economic Association Annual Meeting, January 2019.