8 Monthly Labor Review February 2005

Antecedents of NLSY79

I

n 1965, at the prompting of the Assistant

Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick

Moynihan, individuals from the Department

of Labor (DOL) and Ohio State University

designed the National Longitudinal Surveys of

Labor Market Experience. At the time, the

participants did not realize that they were creating

one of the premier, large scale national longitudinal

surveys in the United States. Initially funded for 5

years by the Department of Labor, the “Parnes”

data, as the Original Cohorts were called,

continued for 37 years, with the last scheduled

fielding of the women samples in 2003.1 The

success of the Original Cohorts led to the creation

of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

(NLSY79).

This article explores antecedents and predecessors of the National Longitudinal Survey of

Youth, 1979. 2 Longitudinal data are now so

plentiful that it is difficult to imagine the world in

which they did not exist. Yet, in the mid-1960s, the

large scale longitudinal household surveys that

came to dominate areas of sociology, demography,

and labor economics did not exist. Analyses that

are now commonplace were either not possible or

inference was restricted to small or specialized

samples.

Yet to suggest that there were no longitudinal

data sources prior to 1965 is wrong; several

longitudinal surveys predate the NLS. Two wellAntecedents of NLSY79

known studies reflect the nature of longitudinal

data available before the start of the NLS. The

Glueck study of juvenile delinquents from the

Boston area followed 1,000 adolescents (500

juvenile delinquents and 500 non-delinquents) into

adulthood to examine criminal behavior and

contact with the justice system.3

 

Sheldon and

Eleanor Glueck started interviewing at the end of

1938, completing the first wave of interviews in

1948. Two more waves of interviews followed as

the youth were interviewed at ages 25 and 32.

Interviews continued until 1965.

The other study available before the NLS, and

perhaps more visible to economists, is the National

Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)-Thorndike

sample, collected from Air Force volunteers during

WWII. In 1955, R. Thorndike and E. Hagen

randomly selected 17,000 of the 75,000 Air Force

volunteers who took the Aviation Cadet Qualifying

Test in the second half of 1943 (a test similar in

function to the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude

Battery (ASVAB) tests that NLSY79 respondents

took to set a norm in recruiting standards for the

Department of Defense). In 1969, with funding from

the NBER, Paul Taubman and his colleagues

reinterviewed about 5,000 of the original 17,000

members of the Thorndike sample, obtaining

information on current and retrospective earnings,

education, and occupation. These data have been

widely used to study the determinants of earnings,

Antecedents and predecessors

of NLSY79: paving the course

A historical view of the NLSY79 development stages

highlights lessons learned during an era filled with new concepts

and innovations in sociology, economics, and computer science

James R. Walker

James R. Walker is

professor of

economics in the

Department of

Economics,

University of

WisconsinMadison. E-mail:

walker@ssc.wisc.edu.
Monthly Labor Review February 2005 9

ability bias, and the return to schooling (that is, benefits

associated with higher levels of schooling).4

A number of other specialized longitudinal studies were

launched in the decade prior to the NLS. These efforts

surveyed teen mothers, drug users, gifted children, and

children from privileged and underprivileged backgrounds.5

These studies shared features like the Gluecks’ study and

the NBER-Thorndike study in that they were local in character

with limited or irregular longitudinal followups. However,

several studies are impressive and cover a long arc of their

respondents’ lives.6

Antecedents

Scientific frontiers. Two critical elements came together in

the 1960s supporting the development of large, household

surveys. First, the social science field had developed the

conceptual foundation supporting the use of longitudinal

data. Within the fields of psychology and sociology,

researchers and scientists fostered the life course

perspective, viewing human development as following a

sequence of stages.7 And second, in the economics field,

human capital became the organizing conceptual framework.

In his 1960 Presidential Address to the American Economics

Association, T.W. Schultz presented his influential thoughts

on human capital.8 The human capital theory quickly became

a central concept for understanding the determinants of

wages, the structure of earnings, and more generally, the

distribution of economic opportunities. Labor economists

sought to measure the return to schooling, labor market

experience, and tenure with an employer. Social scientists

sought to understand schooling decisions, both in terms of

quantity (the amount of schooling obtained) and in terms of

quality (types of post secondary schooling).

Intervention and experiments. The intellectual primacy of

measuring education and training fueled and was fueled by

the era of big social science and policy interventionism of the

mid-1960s. In 1964, the Johnson Administration announced

the War on Poverty. Education and training programs were

among the most important anti-poverty programs proposed.

Thus, measuring and understanding the determinants and

consequences of poverty required the collection of new,

longitudinal household level data. The Department of Labor,

Office of Economic Opportunity initiated a survey of the same

name in 1967, followed by the Panel Study of Income

Dynamics (PSID), conducted by the Census Bureau in 1968.

The mid-1960s also witnessed the negative income tax

experiments in Gary, New Jersey; Seattle, Washington; and

Denver, Colorado. These experiments varied in size and focus,

but each was large with sizable treatment and control groups.

And, unlike the NLS and PSID surveys, which “only” collected

information on the respondents, the experiments were more

ambitious, comprising both an important experimental design

component and an extensive data collection component.

Also, the experiments generated another source of

longitudinal data and provided additional demands for their

analysis and interpretation.

Yet, conducting the social experiments reflected certain

optimism (as it only makes sense to investigate the source of

the disease if remedies are available). Indeed, demand for

these new forms of data were perhaps driven by the belief in

the effectiveness of interventionist economic policies, and

particularly labor market policies to enhance human capital.

In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and

Training Act, which generated an array of training programs

targeted to the low-skilled, unemployed, and underemployed

population. The Comprehensive Training Act of 1973

attempted to unify the existing Federal programs, and initiated

programs to additional groups (for example, welfare

recipients). The quasi-experimental designs of the 1960s and

1970s called for longitudinal data that could be used to

compare labor market outcomes for treatment groups and

control groups. These outcomes were matched with

observable personal characteristics for at least two points in

time (for the treatment group, before and after training). The

need for individual longitudinal data is transparent. Indeed, a

primary motivation for the NLSY79 cohort was “to permit a

replication of the analysis of the 1960s Young Men and Young

Women cohorts and to assist in the evaluation of the

expanded employment and training programs for youth

legislated in the 1977 amendments to the Comprehensive

Training Act of 1973.”9

The analysis gap. Analyses of longitudinal data started

appearing in the major journals about 10 years after data

collection. To prove this, Frank Stafford assessed empirical

practices within labor economics according to the content

and practices of labor papers published in the top economics

journals.10

For example, Stafford reports that more than half of the

papers published in the six major journals in the first half of

the 1960s on labor market topics were theoretical, with no

empirical analyses. Of those reporting empirical analyses,

(national) time series data or aggregate (say, to the State or

metropolitan area) cross section data comprised the vast

majority of published work. Nearly one-fifth of the empirical

papers of the time period reported on tabulations and data

summaries published elsewhere (Stafford’s term for

secondary analyses). Not surprisingly, given the (virtual)

absence of panel data, no papers during this period were

published using panel data. And, only one paper using panel

data appeared in the top economics journals in the second

half of the 1960s. The top journals witnessed a small but
10 Monthly Labor Review February 2005

Antecedents of NLSY79

steady stream of papers using longitudinal data in the early

1970s;11 a stream that turned into a river in the second half of

the 1970s and early 1980s.

Joshua Angrist and Alan Krueger update Stafford’s

tabulations into the late 1990s.12 By this time, microdata,

cross sectional, and longitudinal analyses have increased

their dominance—now fully 85 percent of empirical papers in

the top economics journals on labor market topics use microdata. The micro-files of the Current Population Survey

(especially the March Income Supplement) was the most

popular cross sectional source of data; and the Panel Survey

of Income Dynamics and the NLS cohorts dominate the

longitudinal-based studies.13

 

However, the dominance of the

PSID and NLS as longitudinal data sources weakened as

economists increasingly (if not frequently) frame and collect

their own longitudinal data sources. The value of

longitudinal data used to address particular questions is

evident from the variety of longitudinal data collected.

The computer revolution. Implicit in Stafford’s and Angrist

and Kreuger’s tabulations is that there is a 10-year lag between

the start of a panel and widespread use of the data. This lag

is surprisingly constant, though the reasons behind it vary

with each cohort. For the original cohorts of the NLS and the

PSID, longitudinal data were new and analytically and

physically cumbersome to use. Computing power in the mid1960s was a fraction of what it is today. Computing was done

in centralized locations, using mainframe computers

maintained by specialized staff. Commonly used equipment,

such as keypunch machines, card readers, magnetic tape

drives, and impact line printers can now be found only in

museums. The personal computer revolution was a solid 15

years in the future. Disk drives and other convenient large

scale storage devices did not exist. Tabulations easily

produced in a matter of seconds on a desktop computer today

required “spinning tapes” on the mainframe, assistance from

the tape machine operator, and literally hours of computer

time. Empirical researchers acquired nocturnal habits, as all

significant computing was done at night. Notions of the

solitary scholar are almost always wrong, but certainly did

not apply to the early pioneers analyzing microdata.

It is also true that the profession had to develop the

statistical procedures and analytical skills for working with

the longitudinal data. With a few notable exceptions, most of

the initial statistical procedures for panel data were developed after 1965. The increased computational capacity of

the computer revolution was also necessary to support the

new statistical procedures.14

Longitudinal versus household data. Besides acquiring

statistical techniques, researchers had to appreciate the

advantages and disadvantages of longitudinal data.

Arguably, we continue to relearn these lessons. The chapters

by Stafford and Angrist and Krueger are informative on this

dimension and on the contemporary research frontier.

Stafford’s chapter enumerates the advantages and

disadvantages of longitudinal data, and compares data

collected by household surveys versus those collected by

program or social experiments. In Angrist and Krueger, the

comparative advantage of panel data is presumed, and the

discussion focuses on empirical and modeling strategies for

recovering causal effects.

The original cohorts

From this intellectual and policy context, the original four

cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor

Market Experience were designed to represent the U.S. civilian

noninstitutional population at the time of the initial survey.

The surveys were funded by the Office of Manpower,

Automation, and Training (now, the Employment and

Training Administration) of the Department of Labor, and

conducted by the Center for Human Resource Research of

Ohio State University. Specifically, the original cohorts are:

Older Men Ages 45–59 in 1966; Mature Women ages 30–44

in 1966, and two cohorts of youth, Young Men ages 14–24 in

1966; and Young Women 14–24 in 1968. Initially, each cohort

was to be interviewed annually for 5 years for a total of six

interviews), with about 5,000 individuals per cohort. However,

cost considerations after the first wave of interviews changed

these plans. As a result, the older cohorts were interviewed

biennially, with the Mature Women interviewed in both 1971

and 1972 to place an interview year at the end of the 5-year

period. Because of high retention rates and widespread use

by the research community, the surveys secured another 5

years of funding in 1972, and again in 1977 when the decision

was made to start a new youth cohort, the NLSY79.

15

As previously noted, a fundamental purpose of the NLS

has been to provide relevant information on a variety of issues

to assist the research of economists, sociologists, and other

analysts. This mission motivated the selection of the original

cohorts. For example, the first cohort of Older Men (45–59 in

1966) was selected to study factors associated with declining

labor force participation, such as skill obsolescence, health

problems, and age discrimination. The Young Men’s Cohort

(14–24 in 1966) and Young Women’s Cohorts (14–24 in 1968)

were selected because of the problems associated with the

preparation for, initial entry into, and adjustment to the labor

force.16 Problems of the youth labor market generated concern

and added to contemporary debate on topics such as teen

unemployment, family effects on youth employment, the

effect of minimum wages, and barriers impeding the transition

from school to work.17

Increased labor force participation by married women and
Monthly Labor Review February 2005 11

women with children is one of the great social changes of the

second half of the twentieth century.18

 

The Mature Women’s

Cohort (age 30–44, in 1967) was intended to enable

researchers to study women who were reentering the

workforce and balancing the roles of homemaker, mother, and

labor force participant.19

Wealth of information. The initial survey instruments

focused on labor market activity. Instruments included the

Current Population Survey (CPS) questionnaire to summarize

current labor force status and a longer set of questions on

work experiences and attitudes to work. Attention was given

to collecting information on the respondent’s current job (at

the interview date) and if not working, on the longest job

held since the prior interview. In addition, information on the

number of weeks worked in the last calendar year and the

reasons for not working are now collected. Information on

education is also concentrated on the status at the time of

the interview. Information on the current high school or

college is collected, if the respondent has dropped out of

school, why, or if the respondent returned to school, and

reasons for the return.

Even in the focused instruments of the early rounds, the

surveys exhibited an eclectic mix of questions on employment

and (for the youth) education. Yet, the instrument also

obtained information on health, training, assets and income,

and family background. It did not take many years for the

content of the instrument to broaden significantly and attain

the breadth of coverage now associated with the NLS. As

James Sweet, noted, this breadth is natural because of the

diverse and competent set of scholars consulted about the

instrument’s content, and more importantly, that virtually

every phase of life is and will be associated with some aspect

of work.20

The original cohorts had a tremendous impact on policy

and on research. In October, 1977 the Social Science Research

Council held a 3-day conference to review the NLS. The

council’s review was so extensive that it required five

volumes of papers to summarize and evaluate the research

contribution of the Original Cohorts. To give a flavor of the

topics, exhibit 1 lists the table of contents to the report on the

behaviors studied using the NLS Original Cohorts. Exhibit 2

lists some of the policy findings from individual assessments

done in the early 1980s.

The NLS Youth cohorts could be used, like the NBERThorndike sample, to study the return to schooling while

controlling for ability bias. One of the early uses of the NLS

was to estimate returns to schooling. Microdata are needed

to obtain information on the many background and contextual

variables that would confound the analysis. The primary

problem in estimating the return to schooling is controlling

for ability bias—are there person-specific unobserved

variables (for example, motivation, parental support,

intelligence) that affects both the amount of education and

labor market earnings. Gary Chamberlain and Zvi Griliches

wrote an influential set of papers using the Young Men’s

Cohort to articulate the issues involved and to provide initial

estimates of the return education controlling for ability bias.21

Now, instead of using the NBER-Thorndike convenience

sample, researchers could estimate the return to schooling

using a nationally representative sample. Research on the

return to schooling uncovered the weak-nesses of the pointin-time measurement of the educational attainment. The

NLSY79 schooling section was substantially extended and

provided researchers with a wealth of in-formation.22

More issues from the panel. In the late 1970s, as economists

focused on life cycle events, they recognized the value of

panel data to distinguish between outcomes generated by

“state dependence;” that is, the true effects of the dynamic

path experienced or of “unobserved” heterogeneity—fixed,

but unobserved personal characteristics that may contribute

to a set of outcomes. State dependence/unobserved heterogeneity debates arose in many literatures. A critical example

at the time was whether unemployment “scarred” workers:

did a long spell of unemployment damage the worker to make

them less employable in the future? Or were workers with the

longest spells of unemployment those with the lowest level

Exhibit 1 Table of contents from Social

 Science Research Council

 report, 1977

Labor supply

Female labor supply and fertility expectations; Child care

and welfare; Marital instability; Male labor supply

Labor demand

Dual and segmented labor markets; Racial discrimination

in the labor market; Sex discrimination in the labor market;

Unionization and labor market differentials; Labor demand

and structural factors – further considerations

Human capital and status attainment models

Human capital; Sociology of education status attainment

Unemployment

Job separation; Job search

Social psychological factors

Aging

Methodological research using the NLS

SOURCE: William Bielby, Clifford Hawley, and David Bills “Research

Uses of the National Longitudinal Surveys,” A Research Agenda for

the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience, part

V (Washington, DC, Social Science Research Council, Center for

Coordination of Research on Social Indicators, 1978).

.
12 Monthly Labor Review February 2005

Antecedents of NLSY79

of skills that made them susceptible to more and longer spells

in the future? As is well known, answers to these questions

determine the type of appropriate policy response. For

example, in the unemployment case, if scarring is present,

policies targeted at eliminating long employment spells may

be effective, but such policies would be ineffective if the

long spells are primarily generated by unobserved individual

characteristics. After nearly 30 years of professional experience in thinking about these issues (and with many

applications supported by the NLS79), some researchers

might view the early literature as naïve and simplistic, yet,

there is no denying the authors’ intellectual excitement and

vigor in these early papers. The authors were aware that they

were breaking new ground and were excited about the

analytical promises held by longitudinal data.23

Impact of the original cohorts

The success of the Original Cohorts paved the way for the

NLSY79. The promise of longitudinal data and the policy

issues of the mid- to late 1970s called for another youth cohort.

Given a chance to field another cohort, the research

community had an opportunity to correct some of the

deficiencies of the original cohorts and to collect data on

new topics. The participants of the Social Science Research

Council review panel of 1977 were charged to:

• Provide a comprehensive review of research based on

 the NLS

• Identify new directions

• Suggest analytical strategies

• Comment on survey content

Conference attendees took their job seriously and provided

thoughtful and broad perspectives of the NLS. Indeed,

participants developed several critical suggestions that

shaped the design of NLSY79 . Most notably, the panel

advocated collection of more extensive labor market

experience data. A methodological paper by Burton Singer

illustrated the analytical advantages of collecting event

histories (that is, a full enumeration of the start and stop

dates of all jobs held since the last interview).24 The state

dependence/unobserved heterogeneity analyses of the

original cohorts highlighted the need for precise timing

information to construct the correct temporal sequence of

education, marriage, employment and fertility decisions and

outcomes. The event histories collected in the NLSY79 is one

of its innovations.25

As noted, the Social Science Research Council review

committee also recommended improved information on

schooling. Here, the interest was to gain improved

information on the type and nature of post secondary

schooling, and especially on vocational training. At the time

of the recommendation on schooling, the NLS program was

housed within the Employment and Training Administration

of DOL.

Lessons learned. The Social Science Research Council

recommended that the definition of the sampling universe be

refined from the noninstitutionalized population. The Census

Bureau did the field work and gained expertise in following

the noninstitutionalized population. Yet, as the review panel

notes, this practice induced bias in the construction of the

Original Youth cohorts. For example, for the Young Men’s

cohort, men in jail or in the military were defined out of scope

and excluded (at the height of the Vietnam War). The

definition also reflects the survey’s point-in-time structure

and the cross sectional thinking behind it—persons

Exhibit 2. Topics of the NLS Cohorts

 before 1979

Young Men and Young Women

School to work transitions; Effects of minimum wage;

Returns to schooling and ability bias; Impact of early

employment on later success; Consequences of early

childbearing among teenagers; Effects of unemployment

insurance benefits

Mature Women

Effect of discontinuous work experience on earnings and

labor supply; Balancing family and work demands; Market

availability of child care and women’s employment; Effect

of income tax on labor supply of married women

Older Men

Retirement decisions of older men; Effects of unemployment insurance benefits; General issues relating to the

aging of the population; Relationship between health and

employment; Broad range of socio-economic considerations of the elderly; Analysis of age discrimination in

employment

SOURCE: Center for Human Resource Research, “The National

Longitudinal Surveys and Public Policy” (Columbus, Ohio. The Ohio

State University, no date ); Duane Leigh, “The National Longitudinal

Surveys: A Selective Survey of Recent Evidence,” paper presented at

the American Economic Association Meetings (Washington, DC, Dec.

28, 1981); and June O’Neill, “Review of the National Longitudinal

Surveys,” unpublished paper (Washington, DC, The Urban Institute,

1982). Review prepared for the Office of Research and Evaluation,

Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor.
Monthly Labor Review February 2005 13

incarcerated and persons in the military at the time of the

interview would have little employment activity to report and

presumably could be excluded at little cost. An equally

pernicious fielding decision generated by the same cross

sectional mindset was to drop follow-up respondents who

missed two consecutive interviews. This could be view as

simply a mistake of adolescence—we did not know better

then. Indeed, it took the NLSY79 to teach us about the

possibility of retention and the significance of respondent

continuity.

Not all of the recommendations from the review committee

were accepted. As previously mentioned, one of the primary

motivations for the NLSY79 was to assist in the evaluation of

youth employment and training programs under the

Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973 (CETA).

The Employment and Training Administration had front-line

responsibility for evaluating the programs. Yet, the Social

Science Research Council committee argued against

designing the survey for program evaluation:

Significant changes in study designs have been made for the

new youth cohorts [i.e., men and women of the NLSY79].

These include adding questions about participation in youthjob training programs, collecting supplemental data by

matching to program records on respondents who have

participated in such programs, and excluding from the panel

those over age 21 (rather than 24 as in the previous youth

panels or 25, which would be required to cover young people

not covered in existing [NLS] panels). The conferees were

nearly unanimous in perceiving these changes as motivated

by an intention to use the NLS as a vehicle for the evaluation

of these training programs. They present strong arguments

both for the impossibility of evaluating programs under the

proposed design, and for the danger of drawing evaluative

conclusions from the data produced by this design.26

Conferees questioned whether respondents would be able

to provide sufficiently accurate program information to allow

researchers to identify their training program and specifically

their exact “treatment.” Their concerns were well founded;

an encyclopedic review of the evaluation literature shows

that the NLS (and other large scale surveys) have been little

used for the evaluation of training programs.27

This panel of experts earned their honorariums. Many of

their recommendations were incorporated into the design of

the NLSY79 Cohort. Indeed, the survey’s continuous and

detailed recording of events related to the transition from

school to work, from adolescence into adulthood, and now

into middle age have made it the analytical workhorse within

several social science disciplines. The NLSY79 is viewed by

many to be the crown jewel of the NLS program. 

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This article was presented as a paper for the

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Celebration of the NLSY79, organized by

the National Longitudinal Studies Program at the Bureau of Labor

Statistics. The author thanks Frank Mott, Randy Olsen, Pat Rhoton,

and Ken Wolpin for comments, Amanda McClain, and Leslie Brown

Joyner for editorial assistance.

1

 “Parnes” data are named after one of the designers of the NLS,

Herb Parnes, from Ohio State University.

2

 Frank L. Mott, “Looking Backward: Post Hoc Reflections on

Longitudinal Surveys,” in Erin Phelps, Frank F. Furstenberg, and Anne

Colby, eds., Looking at Lives: American Longitudinal Studies of the

Twentieth Century (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2002 ). This

offers another perspective on the history of the NLS program.

3

 The Gluecks initiated a survey design that is difficult to match

today. They interviewed the youth, their families, employers, school

teachers, neighbors and justice officials. And they supplemented and

validated the interview data with administrative data obtained from

social welfare agencies. See Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub,

Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life

(Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 90.

4

 See Paul Taubman and Terence Wales, “Higher Education, Mental

Ability and Screening,” Journal of Political Economy, 81 (Jan. – Feb.,

1973) pp. 28–55, for a description of the NBER-Thorndike sample.

5

 Europe initiated a number of early longitudinal studies as well.

Erin Phelps and others, Looking at Lives: American Longitudinal

Studies of the Twentieth Century (New York, Russell Sage Foundation,

 2002), lists a few of the most noteworthy.

6 The Terman study of children with high ability followed a group

of 672 high-ability children from California for more than 65 years, with

an attrition rate of less than 10 percent of the original respondents

(excluding those who died or became invalids)! See George E. Vaillant,

“The Study of Adult Development,” in Erin Phelps and others, eds.,

Looking at Lives: American Longitudinal Studies of the Twentieth Century

(New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), pp. 116–132.

7

 See Janet Zollinger Giele, “Longitudinal Studies and Life Course

Research: Innovation, Investigators, and Policy Ideas,” in Erin Phelps

and others, eds., Looking atLives: American Longitudinal Studies of the

Twentieth Century (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2002). Giele

discusses the synthesis in developmental psychology, sociology, and

history after World War II that led to a new conceptual framework for

understanding the forces and behavioral processes as people age.

8

 See Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,”

American Economic Review, March 1961, pp. 1–17.

9 NLSY79 User’s Guide (Columbus, OH, Center for Human Resource

Research) p. 4.

10 Frank Stafford, “Forestalling the Demise of Empirical

Economics: The Role of Microdata in Labor Economics Research,”

in Orley Ashenfelter and Richard Layard, eds., Handbook of Labor

Economics, vol. 1 (New York, North Holland, 1986).

11 However, about 20 percent of these papers using a longitudinal

data source, used the data as a cross section.
14 Monthly Labor Review February 2005

Antecedents of NLSY79

12 Joshua D. Angrist and Alan B. Krueger, “Empirical Strategies in

Labor Economics,” in Orley C. Ashenfelter and David Card, eds.,

Handbook of Labor Economics, vol. 3A (New York, North Holland,

1986).

13 With a small edge in papers to the original cohorts of the NLS!

See for example, Stafford, “Forestalling the Demise of Empirical

Economics,” 1986.

14 One of the first codifications of panel data techniques appeared

in a special volume in the Journal of Econometrics in 1982. Also see

Gary Chamberlain, “Panel Data,” in Z. Griliches and M. D. Intriligator,

eds., Handbook of Econometrics, vol. 2 (Amsterdam, North Holland,

1994). Chamberlain is considered a highly influential chapter on panel

data. Also see C. Hsiao, Analysis of Panel Data (Cambridge, MA,

Cambridge University Press, 1986), a readable gem from the

Econometric Society; and Jeffrey Wooldridge, Econometric Analysis

for Cross and Panel Data (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002).

Wooldridge’s elegant text provides a unified treatment of what is now

an extensive literature.

15 Retention rates at the end of the first six interviews: Older Men

83 percent, Mature Women 88 percent, Young Men 76 percent,

Young Women 86 percent. Please see the NLS Handbook or NLS User

Guide for each Cohort for additional information.

16 Social Science Research Council, “A Research Agenda for the

National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience,” Parts iIV. A Report on the Social Science Research Council’s Conference on

the National Longitudinal Surveys. Prepared for the Employment

and Training Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor, October

1977 NBER volume.

17 See, for example, Richard B. Freeman and David A. Wise, eds.,

The Youth Labor Market Problems: Its Nature, Causes, and

Consequences (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982).

18 See Richard B. Freeman, “The Evolution of the American

Labor Market 1948–1980,” in Martin Feldstein, ed., The American

Economy in Transition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980).

As Freeman notes, “In the early part of the post-WWII period, most

of the increase occurred among older women, many of whom were

returning to work as their children reached school age. Nearly 80

percent of the growth in the female work force between 1947 and

1965 resulted from increased numbers of women aged 35 and over,

whose labor force participation rate rose sharply.”

19 Frank Mott, “Looking Backward: Post Hoc Reflections on

Longitudinal Surveys,” 2002, p. 67. Mott notes the strong policy

motivation supporting the cohorts, but also recognizes the Mature

Women’s Cohort was “created in part because of internal pressures

applied within the Department of Labor by individuals in the

department’s Women’s Bureau.”

20 James Sweet, remarks to a review of the NLS program by the

Social Service Research Council in 1977. See William Bielby, Clifford

Hawley, and David Bills, “Research Uses of the National Longitudinal

Surveys,” A Research Agenda for the National Longitudinal Surveys of

Labor Market Experience, Part V. (Washington, DC, Social Science

Reserach Council, Center for Coordination of Research on Social

Indicators, 1978).

21 See Gary Chamberlain and Zvi Griliches “Unobservables with a

Varianve-Components Structure: Ability, Schooling, and the

Economic Success of Brothers,” International Economic Review,

1975, vol. 16, pp. 422–50.

22

 For a summary of its influence, see Kenneth I. Wolpin,

“Educational data in the NLSY79: a premiere research tool,” Monthly

Labor Review, February 2005, pp. 15–20.

23 See David Ellwood, “Teenage Unemployment: Permanent Scars

or Temporary Blemishes,” in Richard B. Freeman and David A. Wise,

eds., The Youth Labor Market Problem: Its Nature, Causes and

Consequences (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981); and

James J. Heckman, “Heterogeneity and State Dependence,” in Sherwin

Rosen, ed., Studies in Labor Markets (Chicago, University of Chicago

Press, 1981).

24 See Bielby and others, “Research Uses of the National

Longitudinal Surveys,” 1978.

25 For a discussion of event histories and other methodological

contributions of the NLSY79, see Randy Olsen, “The problem of

respondent attrition: survey methodology is key,” Monthly Labor

Review, February 2005, pp. 63–67.

26

 Social Science Research Council, A Research Agenda for the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience, 1977, p. 31.

27 James J. Heckman, Robert LaLonde, and Jeffrey Smith, “Something on Evaluation Literature,” in David Card and Orley Ashenfelter,

eds., Handbook of Labor Economics, vol. 3a (New York, North Holland, 1999), p. 1994.