Discussion Papers no. 882
Findings from employees in child care centers
Workload, staff composition, and sickness absence
Persistently high workload may raise sickness absence with associated costs to firms and society.
We proxy workload by the number of adults per child in Norwegian child care centers, but do not find that centers with many adults per child have lower sickness absence than other centers. However, we do find that more college-educated teachers per child are associated with lower sickness absence, whereas more assistants (with low or no education) per child are associated with higher sickness absence, suggesting that the observed variation in sickness absence at the center level is mainly driven by compositional differences of the employees rather than workload. The importance of compositional effects is supported by findings from individual fixed effects models and a regression discontinuity approach relying on results from municipal elections.
About the publication
- Title
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Workload, staff composition, and sickness absence. Findings from employees in child care centers
- Author
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Trude Gunnes, Nina Drange, and Kjetil Telle
- Series and number
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Discussion Papers no. 882
- Publisher
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Statistisk sentralbyrå
- Topic
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Discussion Papers
- ISSN
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1892-753X
- About Discussion Papers
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Discussion papers comprise research papers intended for international journals and books. A preprint of a Discussion Paper may be longer and more elaborate than a standard journal article as it may include intermediate calculations, background material etc.
Contact
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Statistics Norway's Information Centre