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Worker absenteeism: peer influences, monitoring and job flexibility
Author(s) -
Johansson Per,
Karimi Arizo,
Peter Nilsson J.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series a (statistics in society)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.103
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1467-985X
pISSN - 0964-1998
DOI - 10.1111/rssa.12406
Subject(s) - spillover effect , absenteeism , flexibility (engineering) , labour economics , peer effects , business , demographic economics , economics , psychology , social psychology , microeconomics , management
Summary We study the presence of other‐regarding preferences in the workplace by exploiting a randomized experiment that changed the monitoring of workers’ health during sick leave. We show that workers’ response to an increase in co‐worker shirking, induced by the experiment, is much stronger than the response to a decrease in co‐worker shirking. The asymmetric spillover effects are consistent with evidence of fairness concerns documented in laboratory experiments. Moreover, we find that the spillover effect is driven by workers with highly flexible and autonomous jobs, suggesting that co‐worker monitoring may be at least as important as formal monitoring in alleviating shirking.