Measuring workers' health and psychosocial work-environment on firm productivity

Fredrik Ödegaard () and Pontus Roos
Additional contact information
Fredrik Ödegaard: Ivey School of Business, Western University
Pontus Roos: R.R. Institute of Applied Economics

No 2012:17, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: We discuss a model for analyzing and measuring workers' health and psychosocial work-environment on firm productivity. Productivity is measured through the Malmquist productivity index approach using Data Envelopment Analysis. A novel component of the model is that in addition to standard quantity (or tradable) vairables, we incorporate quality (or non-tradable) variables. Specifically we focus on two quality input variables: workers' health status and psychosocial work-environment. The two variables are modeled as latent or unobserved variables using Item Response Theory. Changes over time in productivity are decomposed to asses the contribution from the changes of the input quality variables. The model is illustrated using data from a worksite health promotion program conducted at three large Swedish manufacturing plants (2 paper mills, 1 steel factory) from 2000 to 2003. Over the four years we observe a general improvement in efficiency of 2-5 %, out of which half can be attributed to the improvement in the quality input variables.

Keywords: Productivity; Decomposition of efficiency; Human resource management; Health status; Psychosocial work-environment; Ordinal data; Latent variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2012-10-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2012/wp12-17-Meas ... irm-productivity.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2012/wp12-17-Measuring-workers-health-and-psychosocial-work-environment-on-firm-productivity.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2012/wp12-17-Measuring-workers-health-and-psychosocial-work-environment-on-firm-productivity.pdf)

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:hhs:ifauwp:2012_017

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).