Generate Synthetic Employment Data

Creates synthetic employment data that mimics the structure and statistical properties of real employment datasets while ensuring no real personal data is included. This function is used to generate public-safe test data for the longworkR package.

Usage

generate_synthetic_employment_data(
  n_individuals = 4252,
  n_contracts = 476400,
  start_date = as.Date("2021-01-01"),
  end_date = as.Date("2024-12-31"),
  seed = 12345
)

Arguments

n_individuals

Integer. Number of unique individuals to generate (default: 4252)

n_contracts

Integer. Total number of employment contracts to generate (default: 476400)

start_date

Date. Earliest possible contract start date (default: "2021-01-01")

end_date

Date. Latest possible contract end date (default: "2024-12-31")

seed

Integer. Random seed for reproducibility (default: 12345)

Value

A data.table with synthetic employment data matching the structure of vecshift-processed employment records

Details

The synthetic data generator creates realistic employment patterns including:

• Multiple contracts per individual with realistic durations

• Employment states (occupied part-time, full-time, unemployed, overlaps)

• Contract types following Italian employment classification codes

• Demographic information (age, gender, education level)

• Geographic distribution across Italian provinces

• Salary information with realistic distributions

• Employment transitions and consolidation periods (over_id)

• Impact evaluation attributes for DiD and policy analysis

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Generate default synthetic dataset
synthetic_data <- generate_synthetic_employment_data()

# Generate smaller dataset for testing
test_data <- generate_synthetic_employment_data(
  n_individuals = 100, 
  n_contracts = 1000
)

# Save synthetic data for package distribution
saveRDS(synthetic_data, "data/synthetic_sample.rds")
} # }