Evaluation of the Australian Wage Subsidy Special Youth ...

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possible the same people with whom interviews were conducted in 1984. Information
was collected about job history, job search behaviour, job training, transitions from
education to work, education, occupation, health, attitude to women working, parental
education and occupation, racial origin, country of birth, age, sex, size of household,
spousal education and occupation, religion, income, and urban/rural residence. The
background variables available for study are then quite extensive. Further discussion of
the data details is covered in the later sections to which it is immediately relevant.
The breakdown of SYETP types as indicated in Chapter 2 is not available in the data. 62
The key issue of programme heterogeneity would appear to be problematic. It is however
possible to identify whether the SYETP job was in the public or private sector, from the
job characteristics. All SYETP placements identified using the SYETP variable in the
data were for private sector SYETP. The possibility of Extended SYETP placements is
addressed and he notes that the analysis of the spells indicates that there were not spells
of lengths indicative of extended SYETP placements (Richardson (1998): 9).
Careful attention is paid to the description of the sample selected for analysis as reported
by the author, in order to enable the same base to be used for the replication. The limits of
the sample are well described detailing the exclusion from those interviewed in 1984 of
those who were over 25 years at the interview date, those who are in full-time education,
or for whom responses were missing in 1984, 1985 or 1986 (Richardson (1998): 5). The
final observations number 1283, of which 104 are in the treatment group ‘SYETP’. 63
Applying these rules, the same number of cases is successfully achieved, and the
replication of the estimation is repeated on this data. Replication of the sample can be
highly informative, as this is where most of the difference in results arose in the Smith
and Todd (2000, 2003) replication of work by Dehejia and Wahba (1998,1999).
62 Jobs which are placements to any SYETP program are simply described as SYETP, with the program
variations not accounted for.
63 As Richardson (1998) details, roughly half of these 104 SYETP had program participation start weeks in
1984, with the rest in 1985. The average start week is the week beginning 13 January 1985, and the range
of start weeks is 72 from week 40 to week 112.