After 40 Years, How Representative Are Labor Market Outcomes in the NLSY79?
Alexander Bick,
Adam Blandin and
Richard Rogerson
No 2024-10, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Abstract:
In 1979, the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) began following a group of US residents born between 1957 and 1964. It has continued to re-interview these same individuals for more than four decades. Despite this long sampling period, attrition remains modest. This paper shows that after 40 years of data collection, the remaining NLYS79 sample continues to be broadly representative of their national cohorts with regard to key labor market outcomes. For NLSY79 age cohorts, life-cycle profiles of employment, hours worked, and earnings are comparable to those in the Current Population Survey. Moreover, average lifetime earnings over the age range 25 to 55 closely align with the same measure in Social Security Administration data. Our results suggest that the NLSY79 can continue to provide useful data for economists and other social scientists studying life-cycle and lifetime labor market outcomes, including earnings inequality.
Keywords: lifetime earnings and hours worked; life-cycle earnings and hours worked (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J22 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2024-04-11, Revised 2024-04-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2024/2024-010.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: After 40 Years, How Representative Are Labor Market Outcomes in the NLSY79? (2025) 
Working Paper: After 40 Years, How Representative Are Labor Market Outcomes in the NLSY79? (2024) 
Working Paper: After 40 Years, How Representative Are Labor Market Outcomes in the NLSY79? (2024) 
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:fip:fedlwp:98081
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
DOI: 10.20955/wp.2024.010
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott St. Louis ().