This project was motivated by the Accident Compensation Corporation’s (ACC’s) interest in better understanding the Linked Employer-Employee Dataset (LEED). In particular, they were interested in its usefulness in answering policy questions on the performance of the ACC scheme.
The following is an example of such a policy related question. ACC investigations suggest that the time taken for people to rehabilitate after an injury and return to employment has increased over the past decade, despite increased effort to get injured people back into work. A possible explanation for this is that this period has seen the entry into employment of individuals that were, previously, marginally attached to the labour market. Are these new workers a possible explanation for the increased time taken for rehabilitation?
This paper provides insight into how LEED can be used to answer questions relating to the labour market histories and outcomes of the injured. In doing so, it sets the scene for ACC to use LEED to carry out future work in examining this issue and other policy questions.
The paper is in five sections. The rest of this section provides background information from Crichton et al (2004) and other sources on the ACC scheme, its interaction with the labour market, and data measurement issues. Section 2 provides an introduction to LEED, with a particular emphasis on areas of interest to ACC. Section 3 provides some descriptive summary statistics from LEED. Section 4 summarises previous research in this area using LEED. Section 5 provides examples of future work that can be undertaken with this dataset.