Younger workers today have slightly less attachment to the workforce than younger workers in the past

Big Data. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Survey data. Employment Big Data.  Those are all things that calculating worklife expectancy for U.S. workers requires.  Worklife expectancy is similar to life expectancy and indicates how long a person can be expected to be active in the workforce over their working life.  The worklife expectancy figure takes into account the anticipated to time out of the market due to unemployment, voluntary leaves, attrition, etc.

The goal of our recent work is to update the Millimet et al (2002) worklife expectancy paper and account for more recent CPS data. Their paper uses data from  the 1992 to 2000 time period. Our goal is to update that paper using data from 2000 to 2013 and  see if estimating the Millimet et al (2002) econometric worklife models with more recent data changes the results in the 2002 paper in any substantive way.

Finding: Overall, the worklife expectancy estimated using more recent data from 2000-2013 is shorter then in the earlier time period (1992-2000) data set. This is true for younger worker (18-early 40’s); younger workers from the more recent cohorts have a shorter expected work life then younger workers in the earlier cohorts.  Conversely, while older workers in their 40s and 50s have a slightly longer worklife expectancy in the later time period data set. We are in the process of determining the statistical significance of these differences.

Notes:

The econometric model described by Millimet  et al (2002) and logistic regression equations by gender and education are used to calculate the worklife expectancy estimates.   The worklife model iin the left panel of the table is estimated using matched CPS cohorts from 1992–2000 time period as described in the Millimet et al. (2002) paper.   The model on the right panel is estimated using data from 2001-2013.

The logistic equation includes independent variable for age, age squared, race, race by age interaction, race by age interaction squared, marital status, martial status by age, occupation dummies, year and year dummies.

The model is first estimated separately for each gender and education level combination for active persons.  The model is then estimated again for inactive persons.  The educational attainment variables used to estimate our model differ from that of Millimet et al. (2002)   In our model, only individuals whose highest level of attainment is high school are included in the high school category.  Millimet et al (2002) includes individuals with some college in the high school category.