Bryan, M., Bryce, A. and Roberts, J. (2021) The effect of mental and physical health problems on sickness absence. European Journal of Health Economics, 22 (9). pp. 1519-1533. ISSN 1618-7598
Abstract
Absenteeism is an important feature of the labour market, imposing significant costs on employers and the economy as a whole. This paper is the first to use a large labour force survey sample to investigate how different physical and mental health conditions affect absence rates among prime age workers in the UK. A pooled time series/cross-section analysis reveals that people with a chronic health condition are more likely to be absent from work, and mental health has a significantly larger effect than physical health. From a longitudinal perspective, we find that a change in mental health has an effect on absenteeism more than three times greater than a change in physical health. These findings imply that the prevention and alleviation of chronic health conditions, particularly common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety that are highly prevalent in prime age workers, will deliver significant benefits to the UK economy due to reduced absenteeism. Further, there is significant heterogeneity between different health conditions, with some having no effect at all on absenteeism having controlled for other factors.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Absenteeism; Mental health; Physical health; Labour market; Labour force survey |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Economics (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 29 Sep 2021 11:55 |
Last Modified: | 15 Mar 2022 12:05 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Nature |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10198-021-01379-w |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:178407 |
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