Sick of Your Colleagues' Absence?

By Patrik Hesselius, Per-Olov Johansson, Peter Nilsson. Social Science Research Network, 2009

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Goteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion treated coworkers increase their own absence level significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. While a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated coworkers is found for the nontreated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behaviour of a nonnegligible proportion of the employees in our sample.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f415ac81d777f469346a567577053a8803bd9af3

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Citations in the corpus

An Overview of Social Networks and Economic Applications (2011, background): “For example, Hesselius, Johansson, and Nilsson (2009) examine absences in the workplace based on a randomized rule affecting about 3000 workplaces in Göteborg Sweden.”