Health and the Work Absence Gap Across Employment Sectors in the United States

Abstract

Those in the public sector in the United States are historically known to have more work absences than those in the private sector. While long attributed to various individual-level or organizational-level characteristics, there has not been an examination of the role that physical and mental health may play in impacting that difference. Using data gathered from the National Health Interview Study, descriptive statistics found that those in the public sector tend to be in worse physical health but better mental health than those in the private sector. While Poisson models found that health did not impact the likelihood of those in the public sector having more absences than those in the private sector, a Blinder-Oaxaca decompositional analysis found that the majority of the gap in absences across sectors can be attributed to the distribution of characteristics across the private and public sectors. These findings suggest that demographic and organizational differences across the public and private sectors, not simply health, are the main determinants of the gap in work absences across sectors.