The Healthy Fright of Losing a Good One for a Bad One

Annalisa Cristini, Federica Origo (federica.origo@unibg.it) and Sara Pinoli

No 6348, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we study the effect of different degrees of employment protection on absenteeism, paying attention to differences between workers moving from protected jobs to insecure jobs, on the one hand, and workers moving from insecure to secure jobs, on the other hand. Using a large representative sample of Italian workers, we show that workers' reaction in terms of sickness leave is not symmetric: losing protection (bad news) is more effective than gaining it (good news). We claim that this asymmetry is consistent with the behavior of financial markets responding to good and bad news. In our case, workers react in a more prudential way to improvements in their employment status ("wait and see" strategy), while they do immediately adjust to worsening job security by showing off healthy behavior.

Keywords: delayed reaction; employment protection; absenteeism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Psychology, 2017, 59, 129-144

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6348.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The healthy fright of losing a good one for a bad one (2017)
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:dp6348

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

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 (hinte@iza.org).