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Higher replacement rates often imply higher levels of absenteeism, yet even in generous welfare economies, employers provide sick pay in addition to the public sick pay. Using comparative population-representative workplace data for Britain and Norway, we show that close to 50% of private sector employers in both countries provide sick pay in excess of statutory sick pay. However, the level of statutory sick pay is also much higher in Norway than in Britain. In both countries, private sick pay as well as other benefits provided by employers are chosen by employers in a way that maximizes profits having accounted for different dimensions of labor costs. Several health-related privately provided benefits are often bundled. In both countries easy-to-train workers, high turnover and risky work are linked to less extensive employer provision of extended sick leave and sick pay in excess of statutory sick pay. In contrast, the presence of a trade union agreement is strongly correlated with both the provision of private sick pay and extended sick leave in Britain but not in Norway. We show that the sickness absence rate is much higher in Norway than in Britain. However, the higher level of absenteeism in Norway compared to Britain relates to the threshold for statutory sick pay in the Norwegian public sick pay legislation. When we take this difference into account, no significant difference remains.

In this chapter, we have analysed the relationship between the proportion of women on board of directors and firm performance in Norway and Denmark. These countries are, in an international context, considered similar in many respects. However, during 2002–2007, the two countries experienced quite different developments regarding the gender diversity on companies' boards, caused by the Norwegian board reform affecting public limited firms. These changes increase the relevancy for analysing and comparing the relationship between gender diversity and firm performance in the two countries. The results for Denmark reveal no significant relationships between the proportion of women on boards and firm performance. As there was no quota policy in place in Denmark in this period, the proportion of women on boards has been quite constant. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that we observe no significant relationships. The results for Norway reveal first a positive relationship between the proportion of women on boards of directors and firm performance. This relationship does hold after controlling for a wide set of firm characteristics. Can this be explained by the quota? No, our robustness analyses suggest not. The results indicate that the short-term relationship between gender diversity and firm performance is negligible. Neither for public limited firms nor for limited firms, can firm performance during this period really be attributed to women on boards. Thus, from a gender equalisation point of view, it appears that one has achieved increased gender diversity on Norwegian boards, without affecting firm performance.

We present theoretical and empirical evidence challenging early studies that found unions were detrimental to workplace innovation. Under our theoretical model, unions prefer product innovation to labor-saving technological process innovation, thus making union wage bargaining regimes more conducive to product innovation than competitive pay setting. We test the theory with population-representative workplace data for Britain and Norway. We find strong support for the notion that local bargaining leads to product innovation, either alone or together with technological innovation.

Performance pay is growing in importance. Even in a centralised economy such as the Norwegian economy, the prevalence of performance pay has increased significantly from 1997 to 2003, and internationally changes in payment methods also occur increasingly. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how performance pay and team organisation and the interaction between these affect publicly‐financed sickness absences of workers.

Standard panel and cross‐section non‐linear and linear regression techniques are applied to Norwegian panel register and questionnaire data on private sector workers and workplaces during 1996‐2005.

Team organisation and performance pay are found to be negatively related to sickness absence incidence rates and sick days, partly due to strong negative relationships in workplaces providing jointly performance pay and team organisation. The negative effect of performance pay on sickness absence survives even when fixed job effects are taken into account. The negative effects were stronger for weak incentives than stronger, and they are primarily related to group‐based incentive schemes.

Introducing weak group‐based incentive schemes might be one way to successfully tackle absenteeism for firms.

The paper's findings contribute to the growing literature on how performance pay and team organisation affect absenteeism.

The relationship between gender, family and employment is often depicted as the outcome of rational allocation between time in paid work and time spent on family-related tasks, such as household chores and care for children and other dependent persons (Becker, 1991). This balancing process may be framed in purely economic terms as a question of which spouse should be most active in the labour market when the goal is that of maximizing the total family income. It may also be conceived as deliberations over gender role norms (e.g. Petersen, 2002). If spouses have similar earning capacity, or if they accord relatively little importance to variation in pecuniary income, they may instead decide the employment pattern on the basis of norms of fairness or gender equality. In both cases the couple making the decision is portrayed as context-free actors maximizing a simple set of values: family income or gender equity.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue on work organization, performance and health.

The authors provide a general review of the literature and describe the main findings of the papers appearing in this special issue.

This issue provides new evidence regarding the impact of work organization (essentially defined in terms of payment methods, teamwork, workforce age structure and labour contracts) on performance (measured through employment, productivity and sickness absenteeism indicators). It also sheds more light on the determinants of workers’ health by gender, with particular attention to working conditions and mobbing.

The papers collected in this special issue provide some fine examples of recent work at the crossroads of health and personnel economics.