Job Training Partnership Act, Adults

Designed to study the benefits and costs of employment and training programs for out-of-school youth and economically disadvantaged adults funded through the 1982 Job Training and Partnership Act (JTPA), the National JTPA Study was a randomized experiment that evaluated 16 local JTPA programs beginning in 1987. The study involved 20,600 participants (both youth and adult). Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020)’s estimates of the MVPF for JTPA-funded programs are derived from cost-benefit analysis resulting from the National JTPA Study as reported in Table 8 of Bloom et al. (1997). Because of the variety of programs included in the study, Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020) compute separate MVPFs for adults and for youths. This pools Bloom et al.’s results for adult men and women.

MVPF SUMMARY

_________

For adult women, Bloom et al. (1997) (Table 8) report an increase in earnings of $1,683, which was supplemented by a wage subsidy of $154, as well as a reduction in welfare benefits of $235. Adult men, meanwhile, saw an increase in earnings of $1,355, a wage subsidy of $244, and an increase in welfare benefits of $334. The program cost was $1,381 for adult women and $1,175 for adult men (inclusive of the wage subsidy). Applying the same tax rate used in Bloom et al.’s cost-benefit analysis (12.8%) to the earnings impacts and pooling results for men and women (weighting by each group’s relative sample size) yield a Net Cost estimate of $1,093, a WTP estimate of $1,504, and a baseline MVPF for adults of 1.38 (95% CI: [-0.21, 2.13]). If Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020) instead assume that participants value the program at cost, the resulting MVPF is 1.18 (95% CI: [0.57, 8.74]).