Impact of Paid Sick Leave Policy: A Social Planner's Perspective

In their article, Kumar et al.¹ examine the impact of paid sick days on influenza attack rates in workplaces using an agent-based model. Their findings show that paid sick leave reduces influenza transmission and hence the burden of illness in workplaces.

The authors would like to point out the work by Liao et al.,^2,3 which studies the impact of paid sick leave on the spread of influenza from a social planner's perspective. As opposed to focusing on workplaces, this study measures the impact of the paid sick leave on an entire society. The study measures attack rates, medical costs, workers’ productivity and social welfare under a variety of scenarios. A detailed individual-based model is used for simulating these scenarios that consider the following variables:

• (1) Honesty of the workers receiving paid sick leave,

• (2) Compliance of the workplaces in granting paid sick leave,

• (3) Maximum number of sick days allowed,

• (4) Infectivity of the disease, and

• (5) Productivity of the workers who work while sick.

The results show that if workers are honest, a liberal paid sick leave policy is highly beneficial to society. However, even if the workers are not honest, paid sick leave still increases social welfare in the majority of scenarios considered. That is because the benefits of paid sick leave outweigh the losses. The results of Kumar et al.¹ once again show that paid sick leave can be a very effective policy instrument for controlling influenza outbreaks. Our research shows that the conclusions are robust to variations in assumptions and model parameters.