Employment

This data file contains harmonized information on HRS respondents' current main jobs at the time of the interview at the person-wave level. The purpose of this dataset is to link main jobs across waves and impute relevant variables which are missing or inconsistent. We produce this harmonized file because the characteristics of main jobs are complicated to track since information about these jobs is collected at different interview waves.

This data file contains a suitability index measuring how well-suited older workers are to different occupations. Occupations are evaluated by how old their retirement ages tend to be in practice; how likely workers are to file for disability; and the extent to which the required skills for the occupation decline with age. These three characteristics capture different dimensions of older workers’ ability to do different occupations. Each characteristic is then correlated with projected job growth to assess whether older workers will be able to do the jobs of the future.

This data file contains a hand-coded classification of self-employment roles for 2016 HRS respondents reporting self-employment as their current main employment and providing narrative descriptions of their work in answer to the interview questions PJ166M: “What industry do you work in? That is, what does your company do or make?” and PJ168M: “What sort of work do you do?”. The approach classifies the self-employment reports into three entrepreneurial roles (own/run; manage; independent) along the lines of Light and Munk (2018).

• When an HRS respondent reported no change in employment status since the previous interview, certain questions relating to current employment were not asked. The files in this data release carry forward the information from prior waves whenever selected employment variables have been "skipped" in the current wave.
• This dataset replaces the Researcher Contribution of the same name released in February 2003

This document describes a longitudinal data set of working trajectories based on the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS), waves 1992 to 2014, and AHEAD 1995. For each respondent the data set contains the working history recorded to the nearest month, using the detailed self-reported information on worklife trajectories included in the HRS.