Male prime-age nonworkers: evidence from the NLSY97

The labor force participation rate of prime-age men has been mostly falling since the late 1960s, with steeper declines during recessionary periods. This paper uses longitudinal data to examine whether men’s prior trajectories of schooling, work, family, income, health, incarceration, and living situations differ between nonworkers and their working peers. It also investigates whether non-work status is a transitory state, and whether parents, spouses, partners, or others are providing support. The data in this paper are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), which contains detailed histories about individuals’ lives across multiple domains. This allows one to drill down past top-level information about employment and schooling to create a more nuanced picture involving support systems, criminal behaviors, family formation, health, disability, and youth expectations regarding educational attainment and future employment. At the 2015-16 NLSY97 survey date about 9 percent of men, who range in age from 30 to 36, had not worked in the prior year. Most of these men had never married, about a third lived in a household with a parent, and almost 20 percent were incarcerated at the time of the interview. The vast majority of men who did not work in the year prior to the 2015-16 interview also did not work much in earlier years.