Child - to - teacher ratio in day - care and teacher sickness absenteeism Do kids make day - care teachers sick ?

This paper investigates possible determinants of teacher absenteeism due to sickness in Danish daycare institutions. We differentiate between characteristics at the individual (teacher) level and characteristics at the workplace level which may potentially determine absenteeism. In particular, it is investigated whether work pressure measured by the child-to-teacher ratio, i.e. the number of children per teacher in an institution, affects the risk of becoming long-term ill. Furthermore, we investigate the role of other characteristics at the workplace level as e.g. sickness of colleagues, the size of the institution, the proportion of the staff who are trained pre-school teachers, family background characteristics of the children in the pre-school etc. We control for individual teacher characteristics as e.g. education, family background, and past employment history. The empirical analysis builds on a unique data set with information from Danish administrative registers about workplace characteristics and individual characteristics, sickness absenteeism, medical records, employment history and background characteristics for the main part of the employees as well as children in day-care institutions and pre-schools in a panel for the period 2000-2006. We use data for both short and longer periods of sickness absenteeism. Se have information about long-term sickness (sickness spells longer than two weeks, for which employers receive sickness benefit compensation) for 2000-2006. Moreover, we benefit from a new dataset for 2005-2006 on total days of illness, i.e. both short periods of illness shorter than two weeks) and periods longer than two weeks. We analyze the risk of becoming long-term ill as a function of observables at the individual level, the school/institutional level and the municipality level. Furthermore, we analyze possible determinations of the duration of a long-term sickness period, and we estimate a model for the total number of sick-days. In general, we find that only a limited part of the variation in absence due to illness can be explained by observables at either level. *) Contact information: Mette Gørtz, AKF, Danish Institute of Governmental Research, Nyropsgade 37, 1602 Copenhagen V, Denmark. [email protected] 2