It’s just past the middle of the term and the number of students coming to class seems to have taken a bit of a drop and there seem to be a lot of people off sick. It has also been a particularly gloomy few days in the news with talk of recessions and rumors of recessions and financial crises and so I began to wonder if economic conditions might influence worker absenteeism.
I quickly got some data from Statistics Canada on real GDP in Canada (2002 constant dollars) as well as data on absences of full-time employees in terms of days lost per worker for the period 1987 to 2009. I’m not sure a priori what the relationship might be. If economic growth is high and the economy doing well, would people feel more inclined to call in sick to take a breather or would they be more likely to show up for work because they did not want to lose income when there is income to be made – that is, making hay when the sun shines.
I’ve plotted two graphs. One plots the days lost due to illness or disability versus real GDP growth rates and the other plots days lost due to personal or family responsibility versus real GDP growth rates. Interestingly enough, when a trend is fitted, both graphs show a downward trend in days lost as the real GDP growth rate rises. When the economy is doing well and there is a lot of work, it would appear that days lost due to either illness/disability or personal/family reasons go down. Are people just in better health when the economy does well and therefore less likely to need sick days? Are there fewer personal and family problems when the economy improves? Or is there an incentive effect? If the economy is performing well and there is money to be made, are people more likely to work through their illnesses. Of course, both these correlations could be entirely spurious as I’m not controlling for anything else that might possibly influence workplace absenteeism. Still, I was intrigued.
The Statistics Canada series for these graphs are: v1405957; v1405958; v41975011.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Hmm … offhand my guess is that stress levels increase as economic grown decreases, and higher stress levels are associated with poor health.
Livio, interesting post, I like it.
You need to check to see if maternity/parental leave numbers are included there. Maternity and parental leave was substantially expanded during the 2000s, which is also when the economy was booming, so that would give you a spurious correlation.
Something else that might be driving your findings:
During an economic downturn, the people who keep their jobs are people with secure jobs e.g. teachers, nurses, people who work in large corporations e.g. banks.
Those secure jobs also tend to have provisions for paid sick days – and when people can take sick days, they do.
During an economic downturn, the people who lose their jobs tend to be people who work in industries like construction, sales, etc.
Those jobs tend to be ones where if you don’t show up, you don’t get paid.
So people show up.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of cyclical vs. secular effects of fluctuations in economic activity within a particular industry.
Frances:
Good point on the maternity/parental leave though the national data would probably not be sufficient to control for it. There is the same data available on a provincial basis which would allow for an analysis with more observations as well as provincial variations.
Livio – to see if there’s anything coming out of maternity/parental leave you could break up the sample into years prior to 2000 and years post 2000, as that’s when the change took place:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/00303/6490-eng.html
You could also look at some US data.
Frances:
Interestingly enough, when you plot the data as a time series, days off due to illness/disability decline from 1987 to the mid 1990s and then they start to increase afterwards. As for days off due to family/personal reasons, they rise from 1987 to 1996 then drop sharply and then resume an upward trend again.
Population aging and/or increased rates of female labour force participation?