Questioning the Stereotype of the “Malingering Bureaucrat”: Absence from Work in the Public and Private Sector in Germany

SUMMARY Public sector employees are often said to have excessive rates of absence from work. Using representative survey data for Germany, we indeed find absenteeism of employees to be higher in the public than the private sector. The differences in the incidence and days of absence showing up in descriptive statistics are substantially reduced and partly disappear in our estimates of hurdle regression models controlling for individuals’...