This paper shows how internationally and intertemporally consistent information on sickness absence can be constructed from Labour Force Surveys, and describes some important features of data that we have generated using the Luxembourg Employment Study. We also analyse sickness absence rates by age, gender and other socio-economic characteristics of workers. These relationships prove to be similar across countries with widely differing mean rates of absence. In this dataset, workers with longer tenure tend to have higher absence rates even when age is controlled for. Absence is also positively correlated with higher usual hours of work.

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We use administrative personnel records of a large British financial sector employer to investigate how workers' behaviour responds to remuneration differences and 'luck' in the promotion system. The main methodological innovation is the use of the early part of a panel dataset to construct an individual specific measure of the importance of luck in the promotion process. The measure of luck is used to analyse workers' behaviour in the later part of the panel.The substantive results should probably be treated with caution until confirmed by evidence from other firms and contexts. In a nutshell, we confirm that workers respond to larger remuneration spreads by working harder. They are not prepared to work so hard, though, if the promotion system operates in an unpredictable fashion.Our evidence also bears on behavioural differences between men and women, and between workers at different levels of the hierarchy. We are unable to detect any difference between men's and women's reactions to the incentives provided by pay and promotion. The large and robust gender differences displayed in the raw data are therefore not due to incentives. We need to look elsewhere for an explanation. Similarly large and robust differences in absence behaviour between different levels of the hierarchy are actually reversed when the effect of incentives is factored out.

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"Conventional studies of absenteeism concentrate on labor supply. An equilibrium approach, however, establishes that the shadow cost of absenteeism varies across firms that operate different technologies. Using an unusual employee/employer matched data set from France, which records both individual worker absenteeism and information about technology, we show that firms operating just-in-time technology have higher shadow costs of absence than firms that do not. The estimates are used to calculate the economy-wide cost of absence, which turns out to be very low." ("JEL" J22, J31, J41) Copyright 2006 Western Economic Association International.