IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/geronb/v75y2020i7p1504-1514..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cohort Trends in Working Life Expectancies at Age 50 in the United States: A Register-Based Study Using Social Security Administration Data

Author

Listed:
  • Christian DudelPhD
  • Mikko MyrskyläPhD
  • James RaymoPhD

Abstract

ObjectivesLittle is known about the length of working life, even though it is a key indicator for policy-makers. In this paper, we study how the length of working life at age 50 has developed in the United States from a cohort perspective.MethodsWe use a large longitudinal sample of U.S. Social Security register data that covers close to 1.7 million individuals of the cohorts born from 1920 to 1965. For all of these cohorts, we study the employment trajectories and working life expectancy (WLE) at age 50 by gender and nativity (native-born/foreign-born). For the cohorts with employment trajectories that are only incompletely observed, we borrow information from older cohorts to predict their WLE.ResultsThe length of working life has been increasing for the native-born males and females, and the younger cohorts worked longer than the older cohorts. However, WLE might soon peak, and then stall. The gap in WLE between the native-born and the foreign-born has increased over time, although latter group might be able to catch up in the coming years.DiscussionOur findings show that studying employment from a cohort perspective reveals crucial information about patterns of working life. The future development of the length of working life should be a major concern for policy-makers.

Suggested Citation

  • Christian DudelPhD & Mikko MyrskyläPhD & James RaymoPhD, 2020. "Cohort Trends in Working Life Expectancies at Age 50 in the United States: A Register-Based Study Using Social Security Administration Data," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 75(7), pages 1504-1514.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:geronb:v:75:y:2020:i:7:p:1504-1514.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbaa015
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:geronb:v:75:y:2020:i:7:p:1504-1514.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.