Nothing Stops a Bullet like a Job? The Long-Term Impact of Summer Youth Employment Programs

• In Event: Reducing Homicide and Gun Violence: Evidence on Schools, Jobs, and Community Strategies

Abstract

Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs) have been shown to reduce youth violence in the near-term, yet little is known about how to sustain these impacts. Employing a lottery design, we find the Boston SYEP significantly reduces violent crime arrests for up to 4.5 years. These impacts are driven by older youth and those with a prior arrest, suggesting SYEPs produce safer communities by providing jobs to high-risk youth. Using a unique dataset of field interrogation and  observations, we show these effects are driven by lower co-offending as well as receiving a second summer of participation, possibly disrupting negative peer interactions.

In the last fifteen years, several experimental evaluations of SYEPs have demonstrated that these programs can have positive impacts on a range of outcomes, including criminal justice involvement, education, and youth development. Positive findings have allowed SYEPs to spread to many new jurisdictions, including new state programs as well. Yet, amidst the proliferation of programs and now sizable body of research on SYEPs, cities still lack important insights into the design of these programs. For example--what age should be targeted for programming? What type of risk level is ideal? (And is mixing of risk levels a necessary feature for program impact?) What other considerations should SYEPs undertake in selecting participants? These results suggest some provocative ideas for how cities can better design SYEPs to improve program impacts--for example, the idea that at-risk participants who engaged SYEPs be offered a second year of summer employment to reinforce the first year of impact. 

This presentation also discusses a related policy idea: finding ways to link SYEPs to other existing year-round work-based learning such as co-ops and internships could be a viable way to help high-risk youth continue to sustain beneficial post-program behavioral changes, particularly for groups of youth still experiencing COVID-related learning and developmental deficits.

Author

• Alicia Sasser Modestino, Northeastern University
  Presenting Author