On the Inverse Relationship betweenUnemployment and Absenteeism: Evidence fromNatural Experiments and Worker Heterogeneity

Although an inverse relationship between sickness absence and unemployment has beendocumented in a number of studies using either quarterly or annual data from differentcountries with varying institutional frameworks, it is not yet clear whether this empiricalregularity is due to changes in the individual costs of absence when unemployment increases(incentive effect) or, alternatively, to changes in the composition of the workforce over thebusiness cycle (selection effect).