Arbeitspapier
Sick of your colleagues' absence?
We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion treated coworkers increase their own absence level significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. While a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated coworkers is found for the nontreated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behaviour of a nonnegligible proportion of the employees in our sample.
- Language
-
Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
-
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 3960
- Classification
-
Wirtschaft
Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
- Subject
-
Social interactions
employer employee data
work absence
fairness
reciprocal preferences
Fehlzeit
Dauer
Soziale Norm
Krankheit
Test
Schweden
- Event
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Hesselius, Patrik
Johansson, Per
Nilsson, Peter
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
-
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
- (where)
-
Bonn
- (when)
-
2009
- Handle
- URN
-
urn:nbn:de:101:1-20090209305
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Hesselius, Patrik
- Johansson, Per
- Nilsson, Peter
- Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Time of origin
- 2009
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Does Sick Pay Affect Workplace Absence?
Sick of Your Poor Neighborhood?
Does Sick Absence Increase the Risk of Unemployment?
A Kink that Makes You Sick: The Incentive Effect of Sick Pay on Absence
Commuting Time and Sick-Day Absence of US Workers
Informal intellectual collaboration with central colleagues
A Kink that Makes you Sick: the Effect of Sick Pay on Absence in a Social Insurance System
Many-to-One Matching when Colleagues Matter
Trade union membership and sickness absence: Evidence from a sick pay reform