For a topic of such interest to employers, employees and people who live in households with employees, good-quality information about absenteeism is remarkably hard to find. While there are scattered surveys of firms and of households and individuals, an ideal data set must include information on both. We discuss some studies that have exploited such data at the end of this chapter, but, to begin with, we present what we think of as a statement of the problem that this book addresses: can patterns be detected in absenteeism? If so, what are they? Are they robust across economies? Why are they the way they are?

Fixed hours

In Chapter 2 we pointed out that there would be no absence, were it not for the fact that employers insist on particular hours (or a fixed number of hours) being worked. The last twenty-five years have seen several attempts to establish whether, in fact, workers sign up for more hours than they wish to work. These range from the crude and not very convincing technique of asking them, to attempts to establish, using micro-data sets and econometric techniques, whether marginal rates of substitution are equal to the wage, as theory suggests it should be if workers are unconstrained.

Lundberg (1985) points out that, if the menu of hours choices available to workers at whatever wage rate they may command is sufficiently rich for them to choose their hours as part of their choice of employer, it must be the case that there is a correlation between offered hours and offered wages.