EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Friday Morning Fever. Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on Sick Leave Monitoring in the Public Sector

Tito Boeri, Edoardo Di Porto, Paolo Naticchioni and Vincenzo Scrutinio ()
Additional contact information
Vincenzo Scrutinio: University of Bologna

No 14346, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper provides the first analysis of a population-wide controlled field experiment for home visits checking on sick leave in the public sector. The experiment was carried out in Italy, a country with large absenteeism in the public sector, and it concerned the universe of public employees. We exploit unique administrative data from the Italian social security administration (INPS) on sick leave and work histories. We find that receiving a home visit reduces the number of days on sick leave in the following 16 months by about 12% (5.5 days). The effect is stronger for workers who are found irregularly on sick leave (-10.2 days). We interpret our findings as a deterrence effect of home visits: workers being found irregularly on sick leave experience a decline of about 2% of their wage in the following 12 months. Uncertainty aversion (there is no automatism in these sanctions) can play a role in these results. Our estimates suggest that home visits are cost- effective: every Euro spent for the visits involves up to 10 Euros reductions in sick benefits outlays. We estimate the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) spent on home visits at about 1.13, which is significantly lower than estimates of MVPF of income taxes in the US.

Keywords: sick leave; absenteeism; randomized trial (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14346.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Friday morning fever. Evidence from a randomized experiment on sick leave monitoring in the public sector (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Friday Morning Fever. Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on Sick Leave Monitoring in the Public Sector (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Friday morning fever. Evidence from a randomized experiment on sick leave monitoring in the public sector (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Friday Morning Fever. Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on Sick Leave Monitoring in the Public Sector (2021) Downloads
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:iza:izadps:dp14346

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14346