Firms' Sickness Costs and Workers' Sickness Absences / René Böheim, Thomas Leoni.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Böheim, René.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Leoni, Thomas.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20305.

NBER working paper series no. w20305

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

In many countries, social security insures firms against their workers' sickness absences. The insurance may create a moral hazard for firms, leading to inefficient monitoring of absences or to an underinvestment in the prevention of absences. We exploit an administrative threshold in the Austrian social security that defined whether a firm had to pay a deductible for its blue-collar workers sicknesses or not. The quasi-experimental situation around the threshold provides causal evidence on the extent of moral hazard induced by the deductible. We apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the differences in the incidences and durations of sicknesses for firms that faced the deductible and those who did not. We find that the deductible did not lead to different sickness outcomes and conclude that relatively low deductibles have little impact on forms' management of sicknesses.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2014.