Re-estimating the Gainful Employment Rate of Older Men: the United States, 1870 to 1930

John Gardner, Brian Gratton and Jon Moen

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Analyses of the economic effects of the introduction of the public pension system on older men in the US have been hamstrung by difficulties generating reliable estimates of historical labor-force participation rates using data from early US censuses that only asked respondents about their occupations and not whether they were actively employed. We extend a unique feature of the 1901 Canadian census, which asked about retirement status as well as occupation, to older men in the 1900 US Census to estimate labor-force participation rates that adjust for misreporting of employment status. Our estimates show that reported rates substantially overestimate labor-force participation among older men. We also show that adjusted rates based on an econometric correction for misclassified limited dependent variables produces are similar to those based on the 1901 Canadian census. Using this technique to extend our adjustment shows that reported rates overstate older men’s labor-force participation rates in the 1880, 1910, 1920 and 1930 census, as well as the decline in those rates between 1900 and 1910.

Keywords: Retirement; census; gainful employment; misclassification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N31 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-his
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:88729

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