This book has been a long time in the making, and we have many people and organisations to thank for support of many different kinds. The unwitting provider of many of the ideas in the book was a frozen chicken factory in Aldershot, which employed the youthful John Treble for a few weeks in 1967. During a labour economics class at the University of Hull in the early 1980s a third-year undergraduate student (whose name is now lost in the mists of time) asked an innocent question about prices and incentives, which provided the initial impetus for all our work on absenteeism. Our ideas about the empirical matters were given a considerable boost by a large British firm in the fast-moving consumer goods sector, which not only gave us access to its personnel and pay records but also paid for research assistance for two years. A second British firm, in the financial sector, was similarly generous with data, and also provided financial support, as did the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust have supported this work with several grants of varying sizes. Empirical work using French data was supported by the British Council and the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs under the Alliance programme.