ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the first steps being taken to validate LifePaths' simulations of lifetime employment careers. It describes LifePaths' existing employment transitions module. The chapter provides validity of LifePaths' simulations at annual and sub-annual time-scales and identify special concerns involved in assessing simulations of recurrent events in the long-run. It presents available results evaluating the accuracy of simulations at the time-scale of multiple decades. LifePaths uses a three-category classification of employment status – employee (E), self-employed (SE), and not employed (NE). LifePaths relies heavily on data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), a monthly, cross-sectional, representative sample survey of national and provincial labour market activity, in order to model these transitions in employment status. As one of several validation measures of the model performance, we compared employment/population ratios (EPRs) for males and females by single year of age that were estimated from LFS data or, correspondingly, simulated in Life Paths.
