We test if social work norms are important for work absence due to self-perceived sick-ness. To this end, we use a randomized social experiment designed to estimate the effect of monitoring on work absence. The treated were exposed to less monitoring of their eligibility to use sickness...

During the last decade several empirical studies have stressed the importance of norms and social interactions for explaining sickness absence behavior. In this context public discussions about the intentions of the insurance, and of the rights and duties of the receivers, may be important for...

This paper studies empirically the consequences of retirement on health. We make use of a targeted retirement offer to army employees 55 years of age or older. Before the offer was implemented in the Swedish defense, the normal retirement age was 60 years of age. Estimating the effect of the...

The paper exploits a unique social experiment carried out in 1988 in Sweden to identify the effect of monitoring on sickness absence. The treatment consists of postponing the first formal point of monitoring during a sickness absence spell, a requirement for a doctor’s certificate, from day...

We use a reform of Sweden's sickness insurance system as a source of exogenous variation to analyse the presence of moral hazard. As a result of the reform, the replacement level was reduced from 90 percent of forgone earnings to 65 percent for the first three days; to 80 percent between day 4...

We analyze the effect of economic incentives on worker absenteeism, using panel data on work absence for 1990 and 1991 with a sample of 1,396 Swedish blue-collar workers. During this period Sweden implemented major reforms of both its national income replacement program for short-term sickness...

We estimate a labor supply model on a random sample of Swedish male and female blue collar workers to study the effect of economic incentives on work absence behavior. We observe work absence for each day during 1990 and 1991 for each worker in the sample. We use non-parametric (Kaplan-Meier)...

Sweden has obligatory sickness and disability insurance which is both financed (from payroll taxes) and administrated by the government. In order to receive sickness benefits, insured individuals must have certificates issued by a medical doctor. Since health care is administrated at the county...

This paper estimates the effects of early interventions in the Swedish sickness insurance system. The aim of the interventions is to screen and, further to, rehabilitate sick listed individuals. We find that the early interventions - in contrast to what is expected - increase the inflow into...

Women are on average more absent from work for health reasons than men. At the same time, they live longer. This conflicting pattern suggests that part of the gender difference in health-related absenteeism arises from differences between the genders unrelated to actual health. An overlooked...