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.

Sprache
Englisch

Erschienen in
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 3960

Klassifikation
Wirtschaft
Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
Thema
Social interactions
employer employee data
work absence
fairness
reciprocal preferences
Fehlzeit
Dauer
Soziale Norm
Krankheit
Test
Schweden

Ereignis
Geistige Schöpfung
(wer)
Hesselius, Patrik
Johansson, Per
Nilsson, Peter
Ereignis
Veröffentlichung
(wer)
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
(wo)
Bonn
(wann)
2009

Handle
URN
urn:nbn:de:101:1-20090209305
Letzte Aktualisierung
10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ

Datenpartner

Dieses Objekt wird bereitgestellt von:
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.

Objekttyp

  • Arbeitspapier

Beteiligte

  • Hesselius, Patrik
  • Johansson, Per
  • Nilsson, Peter
  • Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Entstanden

  • 2009

Ähnliche Objekte (12)