Poisson Models with Employer-Employee Unobserved Heterogeneity: An Application to Absence Data

Jean-François Angers, Denise Desjardins, Georges Dionne (), Benoit Dostie and François Guertin

No 07-02, Cahiers de recherche from HEC Montréal, Institut d'économie appliquée

Abstract: We propose a parametric model based on the Poisson distribution that permits to take into account both unobserved worker and workplace heterogeneity as long as both effects are nested. By assuming that workplace and worker unobserved heterogeneity components follow a gamma and a Dirichlet distribution respectively, we obtain a closed form for the unconditional density function. We estimate the model to obtain the determinants of absenteeism using linked employer-employee Canadian data from the Workplace and Employee Survey (2003). Coefficient estimates are interpreted in the framework of the typical labor-leisure model. We show that omitting unobserved heterogeneity on either side of the employement relationship leads to notable biases in the estimated coefficients. In particular, the impact of wages on absences is underestimated in simpler models.

Keywords: Absenteeism; Linked Employer-Employee Data; Employer- Employee Unobserved Heterogeneity; Count Data Models; Dirichlet Distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 J22 J29 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2007-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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http://www.hec.ca/iea/cahiers/2007/iea0702_bdostie.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Poisson Models with Employer-Employee Unobserved Heterogeneity: An Application to Absence Data (2007)
Working Paper: Poisson models with employer-employee unobserved heterogeneity: An application to absence data (2007)
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