The Short-Run Impacts of Connecticut's Paid Sick Leave Legislation

Abstract

In 2012, Connecticut became the first state to enact paid sick leave legislation. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find the law had modest but negative effects on the labor market, particularly on the likelihood of working in the past week.JEL Classification: J33, J38, H75, I18, I12

The pros and cons of sick pay schemes: Testing for contagious presenteeism and noncontagious absenteeism behavior

“…It suggests that a reduction in contagious presenteeism occurs when sick pay coverage increases, resulting in fewer infections and lower influenza activity. This paper is one of the first to study the introduction of sick pay mandates in the U.S. (Ahn and Yelowitz 2015;Pichler and Ziebarth 2016, are two exceptions). It is also one of the first economic papers to exploit high-frequency data from Google Flu Trends, a rich data set that assesses influenza activity on a weekly basis starting in 2003.…”

Profiling the U.S. Sick Leave Landscape: Presenteeism among Females

“…Sick leave mandates have been implemented in San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., New York City and Portland, among others. Connecticut was the first state to implement an employer mandate in 2012 (Ahn and Yelowitz ); California, Massachusetts, and Oregon have followed. The Healthy Families Act even proposes the introduction of a federal paid sick leave program.…”

The Pros and Cons of Sick Pay Schemes: Testing for Contagious Presenteeism and Shirking Behavior

“…However, none of these papers estimates labor supply effects by disease groups. In particular, this paper extends the small economic literature on presenteeism at the workplace (Aronsson et al, 2000;Chatterji and Tilley, 2002;Brown and Sessions, 2004;Pauly et al, 2008;Barmby and Larguem, 2009;Johns, 2010;Böckerman and Laukkanen, 2010;Markussen et al, 2012;Pichler, 2015;Hirsch et al, 2015;Ahn and Yelowitz, 2015). With one exception, none of the empirical studies on presenteeism just cited identifies or intends to identify causal effects of sick leave schemes on presenteeism.…”

“…Moreover, it shows that a reduction in contagious presenteeism occurs when sick pay coverage increases, resulting in less infections and lower influenza activity. This paper is one of the first to study the introduction of sick pay mandates in the US (Ahn and Yelowitz (2015) being one exception). In addition, it is one of the first economic papers to exploit high frequency data from Google Flu Trends, a rich dataset that assesses influenza activity on a weekly basis starting from 2003.…”