The Length of Working Life in Spain: Levels, Recent Trends, and the Impact of the Financial Crisis

Abstract

non-manual jobs were less affected, while men working in unskilled manual jobs lost close to 14 years of working life expectancy. Women were less affected than men. With working life expectancy decreasing, the average proportion of lifetime spent in unemployment and outside the labor market increased markedly, whereas the average number of years spent in retirement changed only a little. When we decompose losses in working life expectancy by age group, we find that economic fluctuations affect both older and younger workers. This result suggests that policies that focus on retirement ages only are incomplete. We also compare our findings to the results obtained by Sullivans method, which is based on prevalence rates rather than the incidence-based working life table approach. We find that the use of Sullivans approach does not accurately reflect the levels of and the trends in working life expectancy.

The Legacy of the Great Recession in Italy: A Wider Geographical, Gender, and Generational Gap in Working Life Expectancy

“…Over the 10-year period WLE for men in manual occupations declined by about 25 and 33% for women. These findings are consistent with the results of the international literature on the crisis, as well as with the findings of previous studies on WLE (Leinonen et al 2015;Millimet et al 2003) and particularly with more recent findings on Spain (Dudel et al 2018). The international literature also suggests that highly skilled workers retire later than less skilled workers (Blöndal and Scarpetta 1997;Ebbinghaus 2006).…”

“…As we are interested in trends over time, incidencebased methods are preferred. Prevalence-based approaches yield biased results when there are abrupt changes in transition probabilities over time (Dudel et al 2018;Mathers and Robine 1997), as surely was the case in Italy over the analysis period. From age 15 6 to age 99, individuals can be in one of the following states: employed, unemployed, inactive, retired, or in the absorbing state dead.…”

“…Differentials in the employment rates of males and females should be reflected in WLE, but might have decreased, as the gap between male and female unemployment rates appears to have closed, at least during the beginning of the recession (e.g., O'Higgins 2011). Moreover, losses in WLE due to the crisis might be more concentrated at younger ages (Dudel et al 2018;O'Higgins 2012). We can also expect to observe regional differences in WLE both before and during the crisis, with the changes in WLE being especially large in the South, which has been more affected by the crisis than the rest of the country (Lagravinese 2015).…”

“…Literature on group differences in WLE document strong gradients by occupation (Dudel et al 2018), social class (Leinonen et al 2015), and educational attainment (Liefbroer et al 1999), consistently such that higher social class is associated with a longer WLE. Studies on WLE for the U.S. context mainly focused on white/non-white differentials.…”

“…In Europe, WLE has been previously studied for a limited number of countries only: Denmark (Hoem 1977); the UK (Butt et al 2008(Butt et al , 2010Haberman and Bloomfield 1990); Finland (Leinonen et al 2015;Nurminen et al 2005); and, recently, Spain (Dudel et al 2018). Estimates for a longer list of countries are routinely published by Eurostat (Loichinger and Weber 2016), but are built on prevalence based Sullivan's method, which can produce severely biased estimates in particular if the incidence rates are changing (e.g.…”