Volume 37, Number 2 (Spring) 2002
Johansson, Per, and Mårten Palme. 2002. "Assessing the Effect of Public Policy on Worker Absenteeism." Journal of Human Resources 37(2):381-409.
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 and income taxes. Both affected the worker's cost of missing work. Our econometric model allows for state-dependent dynamic behavior and control for unobserved heterogeneity. The latter proves to be an important consideration. We find that the cost of being absent significantly affects work absence behavior.
Per Johansson is a researcher at the IFAU Office of Labour Market Policy Evaluation, Box 523, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden; email per.johansson@ifau.uu.se . Mårten Palme is an associate professor of economic statistics at the Stockholm School of Economics, Box 6501, SE-I13 83 Stockholm, Sweden; email: Marten.Palme@hhs.se . The authors are thankful for the comments and suggestions of Claes Cassel and Maria Vredin-Johansson, as well as participants in the conference on panel data analysis in Amsterdam, a conference on worker absenteeism at IZA in Bonn, and in seminars at the Universities of Gothenburg and Lund. Financial support for this research was provided by the Swedish Council for Social Research. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in September 2002 through August 2005 from the authors.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X