Gender Differences in Shirking: Monitoring or Social Preferences? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Per Johansson, Arizo Karimi and Peter Nilsson ()
Additional contact information
Peter Nilsson: IIES, Stockholm University

No 8133, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper studies gender differences in the extent to which social preferences affect workers' shirking decisions. Using exogenous variation in work absence induced by a randomized field experiment that increased treated workers' absence, we find that also non-treated workers increased their absence as a response. Furthermore, we find that male workers react more strongly to decreased monitoring, but no significant gender difference in the extent to which workers are influenced by peers. However, our results suggest significant heterogeneity in the degree of influence that male and female workers exert on each other: conditional on the potential exposure to same-sex co-workers, men are only affected by their male peers, and women are only affected by their female peers.

Keywords: peer effects; employer-employee data; social preferences; randomized field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C93 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2014-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8133.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender differences in shirking: monitoring or social preferences? Evidence from a field experiment (2014)
Working Paper: Gender differences in shirking: monitoring or social preferences? Evidence from a field experiment (2014)
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:dp8133

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 ().