Absenteeism on bridging days

ABSTRACT

We examine sickness absences on ‘bridging days’, i.e. Mondays and Fridays which fall between a weekend and a public holiday. Bridging days allow for a longer absence from work and increased utility from leisure, which could lead to increased shirking and absenteeism. We test this hypothesis using longitudinal social security data that cover the universe of private sector employees in a large Austrian region for a period of eleven years. Many public holidays are on different days of the week in different years and this variation identifies our causal estimate. We do not find any evidence for inflated sickness absence rates on bridging days. Quite conversely, sickness rates are consistently lower on bridging days than on regular Mondays and Fridays. Analysing diagnoses with symptoms that are hard to verify, we do not find indications for changes in employees’ strategic behaviour. Our results are consistent with the explanation that more workers are on vacation on bridging days.

KEYWORDS:

• Sickness absence
• bridging days
• shirking
• moral hazard

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J22
• I12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In fact, labour laws and (collective) contracts typically account for occurrences that are associated with increased marginal utility of leisure (e.g. weekends, traditional festivities or family events such as births and marriages) with provisions that mandate wage premiums or time off (Brown and Sessions 1996).

² In Austria, each worker is required to see a medical doctor if he/she is unfit for work. The doctor informs the social security with details of the sickness. The employer is informed about the expected end of the sickness spell.

³ Labour legislation mandates that workers must provide a medical certificate for all absences of more than three days. Employers may request a certificate from the first day.

⁴ For very short leave periods, physicians are likely to issue sickness certificates without questioning the patient’s request (Carlsen and Nyborg, 2017).