Big BLS employment data, disability, and worklife expectancy

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.

Overall the goal of our recent work is to update the Millimet et al (2002) worklife expectancy paper and account for more recent CPS data. In addition we also wanted to supplement and expand on a few additional topics. The additional topics included looking at different definitions of educational attainment,  adding in reported disability, and looking at occupational effects on worklife expectancy.

Finding: We also looked at the worklife expectancy for individuals with and without a reported disability. Disability was not covered in the Millimet et al. (2002) paper. As has been well reported, the disability measure in the BLS data is very general in nature. Accordingly the applicability of the BLS disability measure to litigation is somewhat limited. However it is interesting to note that there is a substantial reduction in worklife expectancy exhibited by individuals who reported have a disability. On average the difference is about 10 years of work life. This is consistent with other studies on disability that a relied on the BLS data. Other factors such as occupation and geographical region do not appear to have much impact on WLE estimates.