If you could turn the dial on one piece of socioeconomic data in order to help children climb out of poverty, what would it be?

Would you improve the student-to-teacher ratio in public schools? Would you build more community colleges? Would you increase healthcare spending?

None of those would hurt, but none would help nearly as much as finding more jobs for 16-year-olds. That’s a consistent finding of researchers into upward mobility. When economist Raj Chetty studied dozens of local factors that correlated with upward mobility , teenage labor force participation proved more powerful than almost any other factor, even high school drop-out rates or violent crime rates.

If you want to interrupt intergenerational poverty, you should help more high school children get jobs. That’s just what Arkansas has done with the Youth Hiring Act , signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The bill is simple: It repeals a 1914 law that bars the employment of 14- and 15-year-olds without a special “employment certificate,” which requires a special application by would-be employers.

Many states require such a work certificate, and this regulatory burden leads many employers simply to refuse to hire 14- and 15-year-olds.

Arkansas has plenty of other child labor laws that remain in place, including bans on labor by anyone under 14, maximum hours laws, and bans on dangerous jobs, and so this new law simply puts 14-year-olds on the same footing as 16-year-olds.

Thirty-one of Arkansas’s 75 counties, including the three most populous counties, has an unemployment rate of 3.0 or below. That means this new law will increase the number of teenagers in the labor force, which is good, if you trust the economic data.

There are a hundred reasons why a job would be good for a high schooler beyond the income it brings in. In a state with high poverty and above-average single-parenthood, getting high schoolers to work is extra important. A 15-year-old with a job has a chance at a new mentor, at a new sense of responsibility. He or she develops habits that will help in adulthood. Jobs keep children out of trouble.

Obviously, the benefits of a high school job aren’t restricted to poor or working-class children, but those are the children who likely benefit from steady on-the-books work the most.

Most of the media are really upset about this reform, but in the long run, I expect, we will see more capable and successful adults because they got to work as teenagers.