Does training reduce sickness absenteeism of older workers? Why perceived job quality may matter

Abstract

The progressive and unceasing process of population ageing, that each country worldwide has been experiencing for decades, has led to substantial changes in the demographic composition of our society, that includes a larger and larger share of elderly people. Consequently, governments' political actions dealing with this phenomenon have become vitally important. Despite significant differences across countries, the most popular measures have raised the statutory retirement age in order to obtain a full pension and disincentive the early retirement. Nevertheless, the mere extension of people's working life won't be sufficient if older workers are not enabled to perform the tasks required by their job efficiently. Within this framework, lifelong investments in training seem to be a useful tool in order to safeguard and improve older workers' productivity and employability. In this study we exploit wave4 and wave5 of SHARE in order to investigate and empirically analyse the effect of training on older workers' productivity, measured in terms of number of missed days from work because of health, by controlling for individual fixed effects (Jones et al., 2008; Hafner's et al., 2015). After having found a negative relationship between training and sickness absenteeism, we wonder through which channels training acts. Since the literature provides evidence on a positive correlation between training and job quality (Schmidt, 2007; Jones et al., 2008; Vasudevan, 2014) we want to verify whether, also in our dataset of individuals aged 50 to 65 years old, this positive correlation occurs. Lastly, by using the longitudinal dataset, we investigate whether training is correlated with future changes in the employment situation, in order to understand whether the reason why older workers participate in training activities is to change job or improve their current workplace well-being.