Twenty-six studies and evaluations of summer youth employment programs, from the 1978 Youth Incentive Entitlement pilots to a 2025 working paper, and what they find for crime, jobs and school.
The pattern at a glance
What the colors mean. A cell is colored only where a study reports a statistically significant effect: green where the program improved the outcome, magenta where it worsened it, chartreuse where the effect was mixed or held only for some groups. Periwinkle marks an outcome a study measured but where it found no significant change. A handful of colored findings are marginal or suggestive; those, and the exact p-values and confidence intervals, appear in each study's expanded row.
Comparison groups. Every effect is measured against a counterfactual, named in each expanded row. In the randomized and lottery studies that is the control group not offered a summer job. In the matched observational studies it is comparable non-participants, which supports weaker causal claims.
Reading the numbers. “Percentage points” (pp) is the raw gap between two rates: a graduation rate rising from 63% to 67% is a 4-point gain, not 4%. SD is standard deviations, CI a confidence interval, and p a statistical-significance value, where smaller means more certain.
Sources and limits. Findings are transcribed from the source documents linked in each row. Two of the STEP reports were read through OCR of scanned files, and several entries are working papers not yet peer-reviewed, as flagged in the study type. This is a first-pass synthesis for internal review.