In many countries, social security insures firms against their workers' sickness absences. The insurance may create a moral hazard for firms, leading to inefficient monitoring of absences or to an underinvestment in the prevention of absences. We exploit an administrative threshold in the...

Unlike most advanced countries, the U.S. does not have a federal paid sick leave (PSL) policy; however, multiple states have adopted PSL mandates. PSL can facilitate healthcare use among women of child-bearing ages, including use of family planning services such as contraception, in-vitro...

Unlike most developed countries, the U.S. lacks a federal paid sick leave policy. As a result, many workers must choose between losing earnings and attending to childcare responsibilities. To date, 14 states and the District of Columbia have adopted paid sick leave mandates that provide up to...

This paper studies how U.S. employees use paid sick leave. The most common U.S. sick-leave schemes operate as individualized credit accounts---paid leave is earned over time and unused leave accumulates, producing an employee-specific "leave balance." We construct a unique administrative dataset...

This paper investigates the role of pain in determining self-reported work disability in the US, the UK and The Netherlands. Even if identical questions are asked, cross-country differences in reported work disability remain substantial. In the US and the Netherlands, respondent evaluations of...

We examine the effect of air pollution on school absences using unique administrative data for elementary and middle school children in the 39 largest school districts in Texas. These data are merged with information from monitors maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. To control for...

We show that Covid-19 illnesses persistently reduce labor supply. Using an event study, we estimate that workers with week-long Covid-19 work absences are 7 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work...

A pervasive concern with the use of self-reported health and disability measures in behavioral models is that they are biased and endogenous. A commonly suggested explanation is that survey respondents exaggerate the severity of health problems and incidence of disabilities in order to...

Incentive effects of pension systems are usually estimated under the assumption that the institutional environment provides a single optimal 'pathway' for retirement. However, many countries provide competing pathways which may include several early retirement options in addition to normal...