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Pennsylvania Convention Center, 202-A
Hosted By:
American Economic Association
Health and Employment
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM
- Chair: Hani Mansour, University of Colorado-Denver
Employment, Occupational Mobility and Job Skills of Cancer Survivors
Abstract
The share surviving cancer has increased considerably due to improved medical technologies and the majority of cancer survivors who were employed before cancer return to work. We estimate effects of surviving cancer on labour market outcomes four years after the diagnosis using individuals without cancer as a control group. We use Danish administrative data combined with detailed skill requirement data constructed from the US O*NET database to investigate whether cancer effects vary by skill requirements in the baseline occupation, whether such heterogeneity can explain educational gradients found in earlier studies, and whether cancer is associated with changes in job characteristics for cancer survivors who remain employed. We find that cancer reduces the probability of employment by about 7 percentage points; the negative effect of cancer is larger if the baseline occupation requires a high level of manual skills or low level of cognitive skills; educational gradients are significant, but they diminish substantially if we allow the cancer effect to depend on both education and pre-cancer job skill requirements; for those who remain employed, cancer is not associated with mobility in terms of occupation, plant, or industry, or with changes in job skills, indicating potential for policies that reduces labour market frictions for cancer survivors to diminish welfare dependence and alleviate the negative effect of cancer on labour-market participation. Further analyses confirm the robustness of our results.Gender-specific cancer survivorship and labor market attachments: Evidence from 2008-2014 MEPS data
Abstract
Cancers are a major cause of morbidities in the US population. Rising cancer survival rates and retirements at older ages improve the probability of labor market attachments for cancer survivors. This study uses the nationally representative US Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) longitudinal data waves, for the 2008 – 2014 period, and the correlated random effects and over-dispersion models that address the potential endogeneity of cancer in the labor market outcome equations. Separate models are fitted using subsamples of those surviving gender-specific cancers. We detect substantial differences between male and female labor market outcomes. Our robust estimates confirm that gender-specific cancers adversely affect the likelihood of employment for men and women. Conditional on employment, the cancer sufferers work in excess of about 3 hours weekly although the hourly wage rates had not changed significantly. Additionally, the empirical results indicate that surviving cancer significantly increases the working days lost for women but not for men. The total cost of workplace absenteeism for the employed male and female cancer survivors is US$15.55bn annually. Our analysis on the labor market presence of cancer survivors should motivate future work on the rising population of other chronic disease sufferers in the US and other countries.Grandchildren and Grandparents Labor Force Attachment
Abstract
As workforces age and life expectancy grows, understanding what motivates workers to strengthen or weaken their labor force attachment is a matter of growing policy concern. This paper asks how grandparents change their labor force attachment when grandchildren arrive by first using a multigenerational sample from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to study individual-level responses, and then use Current Population Survey (CPS) data to study how grandparenthood trends change labor force participation rate of older male workers. Grandchildren's impact on age of retirement, hours worked, whether the grandfather is in the labor force, or the grandmother reports non-zero annual hours worked are estimated. Endogeneity between fertility timing and grandparent characteristics is instrumented for by exploiting exogenous state-by-year variation in access to reproductive technologies. I find that grandfathers work 339 fewer hours and become 19.5\% more likely to retire, while grandmothers respond to the marginal grandchild by becoming 10\% more likely to retire and working 132 fewer hours a year if non-retired. This paper shows evidence that the arrival of grandchildren does change grandparents' labor supply, but that trends in grandparenthood have only had a muted impact on trends in older men's labor force participation (LFP) rate. In a predictive exercise simulating labor force participation rates, the response to grandchildren is specification-sensitive, but interactions between grandchildren measures and Social Security benefits indicating that a 1 point increase in the fraction grandparent decreases the LFP rate by 0.18 points, and by 4.1 points with a 1 child rise in the average number of grandchildren. Collectively, across alternative fertility and grandchildren histories, trends in the simulated LFP rates do not meaningfully change from trends in the observed LFP rate, although the levels of participation would have been between 3-5 points higher between 1962-1994 if the Baby Boom had not occurred.JEL Classifications
- I0 - General