Entering labor market during a bad economy can be intuitively connected to worse working experience at the beginning of one’s career, and moreover, this kind of effect would persist for many years. This paper is a Taiwanese empirical study of estimating the long-term effect of graduating in a bad economy on wages using data from Manpower Utilization Survey, provided by Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, R.O.C (Taiwan). The empirical method I use is ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The estimation results in this paper are similar to previous researches, providing significant evidence of negative long-term effect on wages for one initially entering labor market during a bad economy. Besides, the effects vary across genders and education groups. However, due to inaccurate predicted time of initial entry to labor market and small sample size, the results may be biased and the comparison of varying effects across educations may not be so reliable.

Bowlus, A. J. (1995). Matching Workers and Jobs: Cyclical Fluctuations in Match Quality. Journal of Labor Economics, 13(2), 335-350.
Genda, Y., Kondo, A., & Ohta, S. (2010). Long-Term Effects of a Recession at Labor Market Entry in Japan and the United States. Journal of Human Resources, 45(1), 157-196.
Hershbein Brad, J. (2012). Graduating High School in a Recession: Work, Education, and Home Production. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy (Vol. 12).
Johnson, N. D., & Nye, J. V. C. (2011). Does fortune favor dragons? Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 78(1–2), 85-97.
Kahn, L. B. (2010). The long-term labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy. Labour Economics, 17(2), 303-316.
Kondo, A. (2007). Differential Effects of Graduating during a Recession across Race and Gender. ISERP Working Paper 07-05, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University.
Mansour, H. (2009). The career effects of graduating from college in a bad economy: The role of workers’ ability. University of Colorado Denver unpublished manuscript.
Mukhopadhaya, P. (2001). Changing labor-force gender composition and male-female income diversity in Singapore. Journal of Asian Economics, 12(4), 547-568.
Oreopoulos, P., von Wachter, T., & Heisz, A. (2012). The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 4(1), 1-29.
Park, S., & Shin, D. (2005). Explaining procyclical male–female wage gaps. Economics Letters, 88(2), 231-235.
Wong, K.-F., & Yung, L. (2005). Do dragons have better fate? Economic Inquiry, 43(3), 689-697.