Brown Bag Seminar: Measuring Work Capacity

Italo Lopez Garcia | USC CESR

Italo Lopez Garcia is a Senior Economist/Research Scientist at USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR). A labor and development economist, he studies human capital development across life stages. He co-leads NICHD-funded RCTs in Kenya and Chile on early childhood interventions for disadvantaged children. His research also examines how older U.S. workers make health and labor decisions affecting cognitive health. In an NIA-funded study, he explores job demands and work capacity at older ages. He employs RCTs, quasi-experimental methods, and structural models.

Abstract

Work capacity is a measure of health expressed in relation to the functional demands of the work environment. Specifically, it is the capacity to perform a job or set of jobs, and represents the interaction between an individual’s cognitive, physical, psychomotor, and sensory abilities and the demands of the job. However, existing data do not allow direct comparisons between functional abilities and occupational requirements. The long-term goal of this research is to examine how functional abilities shape work capacity, interact with early-life human capital, and influence employment opportunities across local areas and industries, shaping independence and healthy aging.

Building on our previously published conceptual framework, this work-in-progress refines our work capacity measure by integrating self-reported abilities with objective performance tests, aligning them with occupational ability requirements from the O*NET database. To address potential self-report bias (e.g., overestimating one’s own abilities), we fielded a Fall 2024 survey among ~4,000 UAS respondents, collecting self-reported functional abilities alongside six cognitive performance tests. These tests allow us to construct two measures of bias, which will be incorporated into our individualized measures of work capacity.

This talk will present the proposed measurement approach and examine the extent of bias in self-reported abilities, discussing implications for assessing work capacity at older ages.