Employers' Importance for the Return to Work of Sick-Listed Workers

Using matched survey-register panel data about 419 long-term sick-listed workers and their sick leave employer, this paper assesses how sick-listed workers react to employers’ threat of dismissal. We simultaneously estimate the duration until the sick-listed worker either separate from the pre-sick leave employer or returns to work for this employer, and, for individuals who separate, the duration until the sick-listed worker returns to work for new employer. To capture the effect of the threat of dismissal, we use a structurally-dependent-competing-risks model, allowing the risk of separation to affect the risk of returning to work. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, we cannot identify that employers’ dismissal threat affects the sick-listed workers’ chance of returning to work.
The paper is written by associate professor, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen and Centre for Applied Microeconomics, University of Copenhagen, senior researcher, Jan Høgelund, the Danish National Institute of Social Research, and research assistant Nis Vilhelm Benn, the Danish National Institute of Social Research.