"Absenteeism is the single most important cause of lost labour time, yet it has received much less scholarly attention than more dramatic forms of industrial disruption, such as strikes. Arguing that any explanation of absence rates must take into account the interests of both employers and...

Previous attempts to analyse international differences in patterns of worker absenteeism have not been convincing because of the difficulty in obtaining internationally comparable data. In this paper, we apply the technique described by Barmby, Ercolani and Treble(1999) to data on full-time...

This paper uses the UK Labour Force Survey data over the period 1984-2002 to analyse the determinants of the level of worker absenteeism in the UK. We find that absenteeism is particularly sensitive to measured aspects of the workers contractual arrangements. We argue that this is important for...