Sick leave payments represent a significant portion of public health expenditures and labor costs. Reductions in replacement levels are a commonly used instrument to tackle moral hazard and to increase the efficiency of the health insurance market. In Germany's Statutory Health Insurance (SHI)...

This paper compares contractual with effective working hours and wages, respectively. Effective working hours are defined as contractual working hours minus absent working hours. This approach takes into account workers' downward adjustment of working time via paid absenteeism if working time...

Although an inverse relationship between sickness absence and unemployment has been documented in a number of studies using either quarterly or annual data from different countries with varying institutional frameworks, it is not yet clear whether this empirical regularity is due to changes in...