High School Clubs Participation and Earnings

Abstract:     
This paper estimates the effect of participation in high school extracurricular activities on future earnings, making three important contributions to the existing literature: 1) it compares the earnings effects of participation in different types of clubs; 2) it investigates whether the effect of clubs participation is constant over time; and 3) it employs an instrumental variables approach in order to identify a causal link between clubs participation and wages. Using the NLSY79 dataset, I find that participation in high school clubs leads to higher future earnings. While previous studies have focused on athletics, I show that participation in both athletics and academic clubs have positive earnings effects. These results are robust to various estimation routines and robustness checks.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 28

Keywords: earnings, high school clubs, NLSY, instrumental variables

JEL Classification: J31

working papers series