Using a piecewise Cox PH model to analyse changes in employment biographies

Abstract

The relatively new research field of mobility biographies designates the analyses of mobility behaviour and the availability of mobility tools in a life span. This includes the individual employment biography even though it also represents a research field in its own right. The retrospective survey Mobility Biographies: A Life-Course Approach to Travel Behaviour and Residential Choice collects data on individual mobility biographies of three different generations in a household: students, their parents and grandparents. Survival analyses for recurrent events is used to identify impacts on the individual decision of workplace changes in a life span and tests for differences between gender and the generations. Besides generation effects so called key effects could be found in the data. A piece-wise cox proportional hazard model is used to include the time dependency of the explanatory variable gender.