Recent policy discussions have proposed government-guaranteed jobs, including for youth. One key potential benefit of youth employment is a reduction in criminal justice contact. Prior work on summer youth employment programs has documented little-to-no effect of the program on crime during the program but has found decreases in violent and other serious crimes among “at-risk” youth in the year or two after the program. We add to this picture by studying randomized lotteries for access to the New York City Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), the largest such program in the United States. We link SYEP data to New York State criminal records data to investigate outcomes of 163,447 youth who participated in a SYEP lottery between 2005 and 2008. We find evidence that SYEP participation decreases arrests and convictions during the program summer, effects that are driven by the small fraction (3 percent) of SYEP youth who are at-risk, as defined by having been arrested before the start of the program. We conclude that an important benefit of SYEPs is the contemporaneous effect during the program summer and that the effect is concentrated among individuals with prior contact with the criminal justice system.

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青年就业对犯罪的影响：来自纽约市彩票的证据

最近的政策讨论提出了政府保证的工作，包括青年。青年就业的一个关键潜在好处是减少刑事司法接触。先前关于夏季青年就业计划的工作记录了该计划在计划期间对犯罪的影响几乎没有，但发现在计划结束后的一两年内，“高危”青年中的暴力和其他严重犯罪有所减少。我们通过研究随机抽签来参与纽约市夏季青年就业计划 (SYEP)，这是美国最大的此类计划。我们将 SYEP 数据与纽约州犯罪记录数据相关联，以调查 2005 年至 2008 年间参与 SYEP 抽签的 163,447 名青年的结果。我们发现有证据表明 SYEP 参与减少了该计划夏季期间的逮捕和定罪，由处于风险中的一小部分（3%）SYEP 青年所驱动的影响，定义为在项目开始前被捕。我们得出结论，SYEP 的一个重要好处是项目夏季期间的同期效应，并且该效应集中在先前与刑事司法系统接触过的个人中。