Skip Navigation


Law, Probability and Risk Advance Access originally published online on February 27, 2009
Law, Probability and Risk 2009 8(1):1-24; doi:10.1093/lpr/mgp001
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
8/1/1    most recent
mgp001v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Pan, Q.
Right arrow Articles by Gastwirth, J. L.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Issues in the use of survival analysis to estimate damages in equal employment cases

Qing Pan{dagger} and Joseph L. Gastwirth

Department of Statistics, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA

{dagger} Corresponding author. Email: qpan{at}gwu.edu

Received on 3 July 2008. Revised on 23 December 2008. Accepted on 8 January 2009.


  Abstract

After plaintiffs prevail in employment discrimination cases, courts need to estimate the compensation they deserve. This issue arose after a defendant was found to have discriminated against job applicants older than 40 years. In order to compensate the successful plaintiffs, the court needed to estimate the length of time they would have worked, had they been hired. The job histories of 127 current employees and 43 employees who recently left were available for analysis. The accelerated failure time model, commonly used for the analysis of survival data, provides an estimate of the mean employment duration, adjusting for covariates. Three legal opinions emphasized that damage awards should be based on data concerning employees with similar qualifications as the plaintiffs so an ability model is proposed. A simulation study illustrates the potential underestimation of the job tenures of the deserving plaintiffs by the method adopted in the case. On the other hand, that method, which did not consider ability, can lead to compensating low-ability plaintiffs who would not be hired even in a non-discriminatory environment. Finally, the methods are applied to the motivating example and an appropriate damage award is suggested.

Keywords: damage compensation; discrimination; equal employment cases; accelerated failure time models; predicted job tenure; survival analysis


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.