Worker absenteeism: peer influences, monitoring and job flexibility

Per Johansson, Arizo Karimi and J. Peter Nilsson

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, 2019, vol. 182, issue 2, 605-621

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12406

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:bla:jorssa:v:182:y:2019:i:2:p:605-621

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://ordering.onli ... 1111/(ISSN)1467-985X

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A is currently edited by A. Chevalier and L. Sharples

More articles in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A from Royal Statistical Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().