TY  - JOUR
AU  - Pichler, Stefan
AU  - Ziebarth, Nicolas R
TI  - The Pros and Cons of Sick Pay Schemes: Testing for Contagious Presenteeism and Noncontagious Absenteeism Behavior
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 22530
PY  - 2016
Y2  - August 2016
DO  - 10.3386/w22530
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22530
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22530.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Stefan Pichler
ETH Zurich
KOF Swiss Economic Institute
Leonhardstrasse 21
Zurich 8092
Switzerland
Tel: +41 44 632 25 07
E-Mail: pichler@kof.ethz.ch

Nicolas R. Ziebarth
Department of Policy Analysis and Management 
Cornell University
2218 MVR
Ithaca, NY 14853
Tel: 607/255-1180
E-Mail: nrz2@cornell.edu
M1  - published as Stefan Pichler, Nicolas Ziebarth. "The Pros and Cons of Sick Pay Schemes: Testing for Contagious Presenteeism and Noncontagious Absenteeism Behavior," in Roger Gordon, Andreas Peichl and James Poterba, organizers, "Social Insurance Programs (Trans-Atlantic Public Economics Seminar, TAPES)" Journal of Public Economics, Volume 171 (Elsevier) (2019)

M3  - presented at "Trans-Atlantic Public Economics Seminar", June 13-15, 2016
AB  - This paper provides an analytical framework and uses data from the US and Germany to test for the existence of contagious presenteeism and negative externalities in sickness insurance schemes. The first part exploits high-frequency Google Flu data and the staggered implementation of U.S. sick leave reforms to show in a reduced-from framework that population-level influenza-like disease rates decrease after employees gain access to paid sick leave. Next, a simple theoretical framework provides evidence on the underlying behavioral mechanisms. The model theoretically decomposes overall behavioral labor supply adjustments ('moral hazard') into contagious presenteeism and noncontagious absenteeism behavior and derives testable conditions. The last part illustrates how to implement the model exploiting German sick pay reforms and administrative industry-level data on certified sick leave by diagnoses. It finds that the labor supply elasticity for contagious diseases is significantly smaller than for noncontagious diseases. Under the identifying assumptions of the model, in addition to the evidence from the U.S., this finding provides indirect evidence for the existence of contagious presenteeism.
ER  -