We test if social work norms are important for work absence due to self-perceived sick-ness. To this end, we use a randomized social experiment designed to estimate the effect of monitoring on work absence. The treated were exposed to less monitoring of their eligibility to use sickness...

Exploiting three variations in sickness absence policy for civil servants in Italy, this paper assesses the importance of monitoring and monetary incentives in addressing absenteeism. Sickness absence is sensitive to monitoring intervals for random inspections, while moderate monetary incentives...

Exploiting two unexpected variations in sickness absence policy for civil servants in Italy, this paper assesses the relative importance of monitoring and monetary incentives in determining a basic measure of effort: presence at work. When stricter monitoring was introduced together with an...