The Response of Firms to Maternity Leave and Sickness Absence

Ian Schmutte and Meghan Skira

No 15336, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study how firms respond to predictable, but uncertain, worker absences arising from maternity and non-work-related sickness leave. Using administrative data on over 1.5 million spells of leave in Brazil, we identify the short-run effects of a leave spell starting on firms' employment, hiring, and separations. Firms respond immediately by increasing hiring, but the increase is substantially less than one-for-one replacement. Hiring responses are more pronounced for absences arising in occupations with more transferable skills and in firms operating in thicker labor markets. Overall, our results imply that using external markets is costly and firms manage absences through other channels.

Keywords: job turnover; hires; employment determination; maternity leave; sick leave (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J21 J23 J63 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 83 pages
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published online in: Journal of Human Resources , 6 July 2023

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15336.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Response of Firms to Maternity Leave and Sickness Absence (2022)
Working Paper: The Response of Firms to Maternity Leave and Sickness Absence (2020)
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:iza:izadps:dp15336

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().