Worklife Expectancy of Railroad Workers Based on the Twenty-Fifth Actuarial Valuation Using Both Competing Risks/Multiple Decrement Theory and the Markov Railroad Model

The U. S. Railroad Retirement Board's Bureau of the Actuary publishes valuations of the retirement plan for railroad workers every three years. The most current report, the Twenty-Fifth Actuarial Valuation, released in August 2012 covers the years 2008-10. We use data on mortality, disability retirements, age retirements, and other final withdrawals contained in the Technical Supplement of this valuation to estimate worklife expectancies (WLE) of railroad workers. There are substantial changes in WLE when compared to WLE based on the Twenty-Third Actuarial Valuation and the Twenty-Fourth Valuation. We identify the sources of these changes. In addition to WLE, we estimate entire probability mass functions and provide summary measures of distributional characteristics of time spent in railroad work. Our main results use a competing risks/multiple decrement model, but we also provide WLE based on the railroad Markov process model and show that the former model is also a Markov model, albeit a different Markov model from the railroad Markov model.