Trade union membership and sickness absence: Evidence from a sick pay reform

Laszlo Goerke and Markus Pannenberg

Labour Economics, 2015, vol. 33, issue C, 13-25

Abstract: In 1996, statutory sick pay was reduced for private sector workers in Germany. Using the empirical observation that trade union members are dismissed less often than non-members, we construct a theoretical model to predict how absence behaviour will respond to the sick pay reform. We show that union members may have stronger incentives (1) to be absent and (2) to react to the cut in sick pay. In the empirical investigation, we observe more pronounced reactions to the statutory reduction in sick pay among union members than among non-members and find a positive relationship between trade union membership and absence due to sickness. These findings suggest that more flexibility in the use of paid absence due to sickness constitutes a private gain from trade union membership.

Keywords: Difference-in-differences; Sickness-related absence; Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP); Statutory sick pay; Trade union membership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I J (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537115000123
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Trade Union Membership and Sickness Absence: Evidence from a Sick Pay Reform (2012)
Working Paper: Trade Union Membership and Sickness Absence: Evidence from a Sick Pay Reform (2012)
Working Paper: Trade Union Membership and Sickness Absence: Evidence from a Sick Pay Reform (2012)
Working Paper: Trade Union Membership and Sickness Absence: Evidence from a Sick Pay Reform (2012)
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:eee:labeco:v:33:y:2015:i:c:p:13-25

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2015.02.004

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().