Job Training Partnership Act, Youth

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). The estimates of the MVPF for JTPA-funded programs reported in Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020) 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 female youths and male youth non-arrestees.

MVPF SUMMARY

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Bloom et al. (1997) (Table 8) find that earnings for female youth increased by $136, with a wage subsidy of $74, a reduction in welfare benefits of $379, and a program cost (inclusive of the wage subsidy) of $1,466. Male youth non-arrestees, meanwhile, saw a decrease in earnings of $968, a wage subsidy of $100, an increase in welfare benefits of $119, and a program cost of $2,165. Applying the same tax rate used in Bloom et al.’s cost-benefit analysis (12.8%) to the earnings impacts and pooling results for the two youth groups (weighting by each group’s relative sample size) yield a Net Cost estimate of $1,582, a WTP estimate of -$361.4, and a baseline MVPF of -0.23 (95% CI: [-3.73, 1.29]). If participants valued JTPA programs at cost, the corresponding MVPF would be -.23 (95% CI: [-3.48, 1.25]).