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Spousal Income and Sick Leave: What do Twins Tell us About Causality?

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Abstract

Theoretical arguments suggest that a higher socioeconomic status can improve health and as a consequence reduce the need for sick leave. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate causal effects between spousal income and absence from the workplace due to sickness. To control for unobserved heterogeneity a Swedish sample of female twins and a semiparametric censored fixed-effects model was used. Results for dizygotic (fraternal) twins indicated that male spousal income, i.e., a non-shared environmental influence, reduced the share of income that was government-paid sickness benefits. Data on monozygotic twins, who have identical genes, provide a more complete control for unobserved heterogeneity. No causal effect was found in this case.

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Notes

  1. Auld and Sidhu (2005) did, in fact, also underline the risk for ability bias in health regressions. The role of cognitive ability (intelligence) in health was also studied in Singh-Manoux et al. (2005).

  2. Despite these complications, own income was tested in this study as an exercise of diagnostic character. Results from this exercise are mentioned in the results section.

  3. The Swedish Social Insurance Agency has no official translation of the concept.

  4. No qualitative difference was found if θ = 2, θ = 4, θ = 10 or θ = 100. If θ is set as low as θ = 0.5 the standard errors are, in general, very high and the coefficients are seldom significantly different from zero. For the dizygotic sample, the covariance matrix of the objective function’s second derivative was not of full rank when θ = 10 or θ = 100 for the model with the disposable income in 1998 for the spouse. These results are available on request from the author. Numerical derivatives are used with a bandwidth set to 0.2. Changing the bandwidth does not affect the estimated coefficient, but its standard error. Estimates are also performed with the bandwidth set to 0.1 and 0.3. If the coefficient is significantly different from zero at another significance level when the bandwidth is set to 0.1 or 0.3 the difference is noted in the tables. (See the instructions for Pantob, written by Campbell and Honoré 1991, for more details concerning the options).

  5. Pearson χ2 (1) = 5.3722 (p = 0.020), estimated from a two-way table of frequency counts.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank two anonymous referees, seminar participants at Amsterdam Free University, in particular, Maarten Lindeboom and Bas van der Klaauw, and seminar participants at Centre for Research in Welfare Economics (CREB), Universitat de Barcelona. I wish also to thank Niklas Rudholm for valuable comments on a draft of the paper. Financial support from Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research is gratefully acknowledged. All data, except for the identification of the twin sample, come from Statistics Sweden (SCB). The twin information comes from the Swedish Twin Registry (STR). The Swedish Twin Registry is supported by grants from the Swedish Research Council.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Research in Welfare Economics (CREB), Parc Científic de Barcelona, Torre D, C/Baldiri Reixac, 4–6, 08028, Barcelona, Spain

    William Nilsson

  2. Department of Economics, Umeå University, 901 87, Umea, Sweden

    William Nilsson

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Correspondence to William Nilsson.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 1 Correlation, variables are measured as average for female monozygotic twin siblings
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Table 2 Correlation, variables are measured as differences between female monozygotic twins
Full size table

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Nilsson, W. Spousal Income and Sick Leave: What do Twins Tell us About Causality?. J Fam Econ Iss 29, 407–426 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-008-9108-9

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