Labor Market Effects of U.S. Sick Pay Mandates

Abstract

This paper exploits temporal and spatial variation in the implementation of nine-city-and four state-level U.S. sick pay mandates to assess their labor market consequences. We use the synthetic control group method and traditional difference-indifferences models along with the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages to estimate the causal effects of mandated sick pay on employment and wages. We do not find much evidence that employment or wages were significantly affected by the mandates that typically allow employees to earn one hour of paid sick leave per work week, up to seven days per year. Employment decreases of 2 percent lie outside the 92 percent confidence interval and wage decreases of 3 percent lie outside the 95 percent confidence interval.

The Effects of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries on Adverse Opioid Outcomes

“…The predispensary estimates on opioid fatalities from the event study did not suggest violations to the parallel trends assumption DD identification relies upon. Moreover, estimating the synthetic control model with over 3,000 donor counties is not feasible due to multiple equilibria and would require reducing the sample size (Pichler and Ziebarth 2018). Similar to the single-treatment model, placebo-based inference is conducted by applying the synthetic control method to every potential control unit for each respective treatment. Thus, for each treated CBSA d, J placebo estimates are generated corresponding to that initial dispensary opening.…”

“…The predispensary estimates on opioid fatalities from the event study did not suggest violations to the parallel trends assumption DD identification relies upon. Moreover, estimating the synthetic control model with over 3,000 donor counties is not feasible due to multiple equilibria and would require reducing the sample size (Pichler and Ziebarth ).…”

Shift work and sickness absence—the mediating roles of work–home conflict and perceived health

“…In addition, Norway is somewhat a special case as the social benefits in Norway related to sickness absence are quite generous compared to other countries. The Scandinavian countries have among the highest levels of sickness absence in the industrial world (Krane et al, 2014;Oke, Braithwaite, & Antai, 2016), a situation usually attributed to the generous national systems (Pichler & Ziebarth, 2016).…”

Is Parental Leave Costly for Firms and Coworkers?

“…Finally, this paper has broader ties to a number of other strands of the literature. By directly estimating the cost of mandated parental leave policies on firms, the paper ties in with a large body of literature on how firms may pass on the costs of mandated benefits to workers (e.g., Summers, 1989;Gruber, 1994;Buchmueller et al , 2011;Clemens & Cutler, 2014;Kolstad & Kowalski, 2016;Pichler & Ziebarth, 2018). By focusing on Danish parental leave policies, our paper is also related to two recent studies that exploit policy variation in leave programs in Denmark.…”