Sickness and injury leave in France: moral hazard or strain?

Michel Grignon () and Thomas Renaud ()

No DT4, Working Papers from IRDES institut for research and information in health economics

Abstract: From 1997 to 2001, the total payment to compensate for sickness and injury leaves increased dramatically in France. Since this change coincided with a decrease in unemployment rate,three hypothesizes should be proposed as possible explanations consistently with the literature: moral hazard (workers fear less to loose their job, therefore use sickness leave more confidently); strain (workers work longer hours or under more stringent rules); labor-force composition effect (less healthy individuals are incorporated into the labor force). We investigate the first two strands of explanation using a household survey (ESPS) enriched with claims data from compulsory health insurance funds on sickness leaves (EPAS). We model separately number of leaves per individual (cumulative logit) and duration of leaves (random-effect model). According to our findings, in France, the individual propensity to take sickness leave is mainly influenced by strain in the workplace and by a labor-force composition effect. Conditional duration of spells is not well explained at the individual level: the only significant factor is usual weekly work duration. Influence of moral hazard is not clearly ascertained: it has few impact on occurrences of leave and no impact on duration.

Keywords: Sickness; Labour Force (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 I1 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2007-02, Revised 2007-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.irdes.fr/EspaceAnglais/Publications/Wo ... T4SicknessInjury.pdf First version, 2007 (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:irh:wpaper:dt4

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from IRDES institut for research and information in health economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jacques Harrouin ().