The Impact of Mass Layoffs on the Educational Investments of Working College Students

Ben Ost, Weixiang Pan and Douglas Webber
Additional contact information
Weixiang Pan: University of Illinois at Chicago

No 10078, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Analyzing how working students weather personal economic shocks is increasingly important as the fraction of college students working substantial hours has increased dramatically over the past few decades. Using administrative data on Ohio college students linked to matched firm-worker data on earnings, we examine how layoff affects the educational outcomes of working college students. Theoretically, layoff decreases the opportunity cost of college enrollment, but it could also make financing one's education more difficult, so the net effect is ambiguous. We find that layoff leads to a considerable reduction in the probability of employment while in school, but it has little impact on enrollment decisions at the extensive margin. On the intensive margin, we find that layoff leads to an increase in enrolled credits, consistent with the fact that the opportunity cost of college has decreased.

Keywords: working students; educational investment; layoff (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I23 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-edu and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2018, 51, 1-12

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10078.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of mass layoffs on the educational investments of working college students (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10078

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().