Purpose: This paper seeks to analyse to what extent absolute wage levels, relative wages compared with colleagues, and the position in a firm's hierarchy affect workers' absenteeism behaviour. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses personnel data of a large German company from January 1999...

Based on new, exceptionally informative and large German linked employer-employee administrative data, we investigate the question whether the omission of important control variables in matching estimation leads to biased impact estimates of typical active labour market programs for the...