Influenza and labour investment efficiency

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the relationship between the spread of influenza and labour investment efficiency using a sample of United States (US) firms from 2004–2019. The spread of influenza is found to be positively associated with an inefficient investment in labour. Further analyses show that the impact of the spread of influenza on labour investment inefficiency is less pronounced for firms in states mandating paid sick leave, for firms operating in the industries where a higher share of jobs can be done at home, and for firms in the industries where there is a lower level of interpersonal contact. Given the raising awareness of public health and firm outcomes, our findings should be of great interest to investors, directors, managers, and public policymakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Employee well-being
• flu
• influenza
• labour investment efficiency

JEL CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• G30
• I18

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Presenteeism is defined as “individuals who go to work despite being ill” (Skagen and Collines, 2016, p. 169).

² https://www.cdc.gov/flu/business/prevent-flu-workplace.html (access date January 1, 2021).

³ Instrumental variables two-stage least squares regression (IV-2SLS) and instrumental variables generalized method of moments (IV-GMM) estimations.

⁴ More details of the influenza activity data can be found at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/fluviewinteractive.htm (access date 5 January 2021).

⁵ As our independent variable is at the state level, in the main specification, standard errors are clustered at the state level. We find our main results remain qualitatively unchanged if we cluster at both state and year levels.:

⁶ The data are downloaded from https://www.onetonline.org/find/descriptor/result/4.C.1.a.4 (access date 5 April 2021).

⁷ Industry-occupation matrix data are downloaded from https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/industry-occupation-matrix-industry.htm (access date 5 April 2021).