Youth Employment and School Performance: Replicaton and Elaboration

Jennifer C. Lee, University of Minnesota
Jeremy Staff, University of Minnesota

Research on high school students’ paid employment typically finds that hours worked per week is negatively related to students’ school performance. To explain this association, many observers take a zero-sum (or time-use) perspective that suggests that students who work more hours per week necessarily spend fewer hours per week on school related activities (like homework, studying, or school-related curricular activities). A second explanation for this association is more social psychological in orientation, and suggests that students who work intensively actively select themselves into long work hours because they are disengaged from school or see their paid employment activities as a wiser long-term investment of their time and energies. For methodological reasons, adjudicating between these two perspectives has been difficult. In this paper we build on the work of Warren (2002) and use a unique data set that allows us to test the merits of these competing hypotheses.