9308379 Wolpin The goals of this research project are: (1) to formulate and estimate a behavioral model of school attainment and job search within a sequential decision-making framework, (2) to estimate the monetary return to education, and (3) to use the estimates of the decision model to simulate the impact of policy interventions, such as minimum wages and legal restrictions on school-leaving age, on school attainment and the school-to-job transition. The research will employ recent methods of estimating dynamic stochastic discrete choice models. The models will be estimated with a unique data set, the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience 1979 youth cohort, which not only contains longitudinal information on school enrollment and employment for the cohort, but also has collected high school transcripts. This project is important because it will advance our understanding of the schooling decision and the transition process from school to work, and it will enhance our understanding for the impact of public policy on the demand for schooling and on the impact of schooling on future wages. ***
