Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35373 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 3960
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion treated coworkers increase their own absence level significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. While a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated coworkers is found for the nontreated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behaviour of a nonnegligible proportion of the employees in our sample.
Subjects: 
Social interactions
employer employee data
work absence
fairness
reciprocal preferences
JEL: 
J24
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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