Measuring the Effect of CETA Participation on Movements In and Out of Employment

In this paper we present several alternative estimators of the effect of CETA participation on movements in and out of employment. Using Social Security earnings records for 1970 to 1979, we construct employment histories for adult males in the 1976 CETA cohort and control group drawn from the Current Population Study. Our results suggest that CETA participation had a small to moderately large impact on the probability of employment. The estimated effects of classroom training programs are uniformly larger than the effects of non-classroom programs For both programs, the largest estimates are obtained from a random- effects specification which expresses the probability of employment as a function of year effects, previous employment experience and training effects. We find that a relatively simple first~order Markov model together with a four grid-point distribution of individual effects is remarkably consistent with the employment data for both trainees and controls. The smallest program estimates are obtained from an exact match procedure which compares post-training employment outcomes of trainees and controls with identical pre-training histories. The matched comparisons also highlight some of the difficulties in using nonexperimental data to evaluate the effectiveness of training.