THE EFFECTS OF INTERRUPTED SCHOOLING ON WAGES

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth reveal that 35 per cent of white men who leave school between 1979 and 1988 return to school by 1989. This paper examines the wage effects of these nontraditional enrollment patterns, I estimate a wage model which allows individuals to follow a different wage path before and after their reenrollment and an alternative model which does not account for school,and work discontinuities. I find that young men who delay their schooling receive wage boosts that are smaller than those received by their continuously schooled counterparts. Wage models that fail to account for ''delayed'' schooling tend to understate the returns to schooling received prior to the start of the career.