CHILD‐TO‐TEACHER RATIO AND DAY CARE TEACHER SICKNESS ABSENTEEISM

Mette Gørtz and Elvira Andersson ()

Health Economics, 2014, vol. 23, issue 12, 1430-1442

Abstract: The literature on occupational health points to work pressure as a trigger of sickness absence. However, reliable, objective measures of work pressure are in short supply. This paper uses Danish day care teachers as an ideal case for analysing whether work pressure measured by the child‐to‐teacher ratio, that is, the number of children per teacher in an institution, affects teacher sickness absenteeism. We control for individual teacher characteristics, workplace characteristics, and family background characteristics of the children in the day care institutions. We perform estimations for two time periods, 2002–2003 and 2005–2006, by using generalized method of moments with lagged levels of the child‐to‐teacher ratio as instrument. Our estimation results are somewhat mixed. Generally, the results indicate that the child‐to‐teacher ratio is positively related to short‐term sickness absence for nursery care teachers, but not for preschool teachers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.2994

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:wly:hlthec:v:23:y:2014:i:12:p:1430-1442

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().