Worker Absenteeism: A Study of Contagion effects

Abstract

A number of recent studies have suggested that workers’ attendance as well as their absence, could have importance for the way in which firms’ design remuneration contracts, see Chatterji and Tilley (2000) and Skåtun (2002). One aspect of this is that, since worker absenteeism is in large part due to illness, if contracts impose costs on workers which induce them to attend work when ill this could result in the illness being more readily communicated to other workers with associated effects on productivity. This paper seeks to quantify such contagion effects by examining a personnel dataset which allows us to track daily absence decisions of a group of industrial workers employed in the same factory.