Monetary incentives vs. monitoring in addressing absenteeism: experimental evidence

Francesco D'Amuri

No 787, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: Exploiting two unexpected variations in sickness absence policy for civil servants in Italy, this paper assesses the relative importance of monitoring and monetary incentives in determining a basic measure of effort: presence at work. When stricter monitoring was introduced together with an average 20% cut in replacement rates for civil servants on short sick leave, sickness absence decreased by 26.4%, eliminating the wedge in absence rates with comparable private sector workers. The impact substantially decreased when a subsequent policy change brought back monitoring to the pre-reform level, while leaving monetary incentives untouched. Results are confirmed by a variety of robustness checks and are not driven by the presence of attenuation bias. No shift is detected in other types of absence as a consequence of the reforms. Given that sickness absence rates are higher in the public than in the private sector in the US and Western Europe as well, these results provide useful insights on how to draw a successful strategy for addressing absenteeism.

Keywords: monetary incentives; monitoring; effort; sickness absence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J32 J38 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/temi-disc ... 0787/en_tema_787.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_787_11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().