Using matched employer-employee data for Italy and newly available information on sick leaves certificates, we study the effect of an exogenous increase in the length of the residual work horizon - triggered by a pension reform that increased minimum retirement age - on middle-aged employees'...

The prevalence of school-based healthcare has increased markedly over the past decade. We study a modern mode of school-based healthcare, telemedicine, that offers the potential to reach places and populations with historically low access to such care. School-based telemedicine clinics (SBTCs)...

Following the arrival of the first child, women's absence rates soar and become less predictable due to the greater frequency of their own sickness and the need to care for sick children. In this paper, we argue that this fall in presenteeism in the workplace hurts women's wages, not only...

Group-based incentive pay is attractive in contexts where production is complex and interdependent, yet freeriding is a paramount concern. We assess the introduction of group-based performance pay in a modern industrial production setting using difference-in-difference estimation. Performance...

We investigate the impact on work absence of a massive reduction in paid sick leave benefits. We exploit a policy change that only affected public sector workers in Spain and compare changes in the number and length of spells they take relative to unaffected private sector workers. Our results...

Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal effect of school absence on long-run socio-economic outcomes. We address this question by combining historical and administrative records for cohorts of Swedish...

Many workers admit that at times they show up for work even though they feel sick. This behavior, termed "presenteeism," is puzzling since most workers do not incur financial losses when staying home sick. The various reasons behind presenteeism are person-related (e.g. individuals' health or...

As vaccines for Covid-19 became available, in 2021 many countries introduced an obligation for employees to provide proof of their Covid status in the workplace, in Germany also known as the 3G rule (vaccinated, recovered, tested). In view of the controversial debate, concerns arose that...

Student absenteeism is often conceptualized and quantied in a static, uniform manner, providing an incomplete understanding of this important phenomenon. Applying growth curve models to detailed class-attendance data, we document that secondary school students' unexcused absences grow steadily...

In light of the dramatic rise in mental health disorders among adolescents seen in the past decade across the world, there is an urgent need for robust evidence on what works to combat this trend. This paper provides the first robust evaluation of the impacts on school outcomes of 6-year funding...

We study how firms respond to predictable, but uncertain, worker absences arising from maternity and non-work-related sickness leave. Using administrative data on over 1.5 million spells of leave in Brazil, we identify the short-run effects of a leave spell starting on firms' employment, hiring,...

Air pollution remains one of the most challenging environmental phenomena. Despite its importance in impacting various facets of everyday life, there is a paucity ofwell-identified air pollution estimates on short-term outcomes for developing countries. Using novel data, I provide detailed...

We study how workers in production teams are affected by the temporary absence and replacement of a coworker. When a substitute coworker is absent, the remaining coworkers produce less output per working time. They compensate for this by increasing their working time at the expense of the (less...

We study how workers in production teams are affected by the temporary absence and replacement of a coworker. When a substitute coworker is absent, the remaining coworkers produce less output per working time. They compensate for this by increasing their working time at the expense of the (less...

Highlights• In 2021 Germany introduced an obligation for employees to provide proof of their Covid-status in the workplace.• We examine whether employees circumvent the obligation to prove their status by taking sick leave.• Our findings indicate that the obligation led to additional days...

Highlights• In 2021 Germany introduced an obligation for employees to provide proof of their Covid-status in the workplace.• We examine whether employees circumvent the obligation to prove their status by taking sick leave.• Our findings indicate that the obligation led to additional days...

The educated corrections officer/guard is sufficiently schooled in the relevant social science area and possesses sufficient theoretical knowledge such that the quality of work, purpose, and goals of incarceration could be met. Thus, the desire to bring professionalism into the field of...

This paper presents evidence on how firms react to a more generous insurance against high sick pay costs. We exploit a reform launched in Sweden in 2015, which introduced different thresholds for insurance reimbursement depending on firm size. By comparing workers in smaller firms with workers...

Motherhood and parental leave interrupt employment relationships, likely imposing costs on firms. We document that mothers who are difficult to replace internally take shorter leave and that their firms hire replacements more often. Introducing more generous parental leave benefits erases the...

Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal effect of school absence on long-run socio-economic outcomes. We address this question by combining historical and administrative records for cohorts of Swedish...

This paper provides the first analysis of a population-wide controlled field experiment for home visits checking on sick leave in the public sector. The experiment was carried out in Italy, a country with large absenteeism in the public sector, and it concerned the universe of public employees....

This paper examines the widespread perception in India that the country has an acute teacher shortage of about one million teachers in public elementary schools, a view repeated in India's National Education Policy 2020. Using official DISE data, we show that there is hardly any net teacher...

Using information on collective agreements and administrative data on mental ill-health, sickness absence, and job separations, we study the effect of decentralization on well-being at work in Finland. Our regression results with individual-and firm-level fixed effects show that decentralized...

Not all countries provide universal access to publicly funded paid sick pay. Amongst countries that do, compensation rates can be low and coverage incomplete. This leaves a significant role for employer-provided paid sick pay in many countries. In this paper, we study who has access to...