THE CAREER DECISIONS OF YOUNG MEN

This paper provides structural estimates of a dynamic model of schooli ng, work, and occupational choice decisions based on II years of obser vations on a sample of young men from the 1979 youth cohort of the Nat ional Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLSY). The stru ctural estimation framework that we adopt fully imposes the restrictio ns of the theory and permits an investigation of whether such a theore tically restricted model can succeed in quantitatively fitting the obs erved data patterns. We find that a suitably extended human capital in vestment model can in fact do an excellent job of fitting observed dat a on school attendance, work, occupational choices, and wages in the N LSY data on young men and also produces reasonable forecasts of future work decisions and wage patterns.