Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: To examine whether firms’ orientation toward employee well-being affects worker health and health-related behaviour. We develop a firm-level measure of well-being salience from the language used in corporate disclosures and estimate how changes in employer well-being salience influence workers’ sickness absence and mental-health care utilisation.
METHODS: We use annual reports filed by Danish firms between 2013 and 2022 to construct a well-being salience score using deep-learning language models. The score measures the semantic proximity of corporate disclosures to employee well-being and mental-health themes. We link firm-level salience measures to nationwide administrative registers containing information on sickness absence and mental-health care use for all employed individuals in Denmark. To identify causal effects, we exploit worker mobility between firms and estimate within-worker changes in outcomes associated with moving to employers with different levels of well-being salience.
RESULTS: Workers who move to firms with higher well-being salience experience a significant increase in sickness absence on both the extensive and intensive margins. In contrast, mental-health care utilisation remains unchanged following such moves. Because worsening health would be expected to increase both sickness absence and health-care use, the observed pattern is inconsistent with a deterioration in worker health. Instead, the results suggest that employees at high-salience firms are more likely to take or report sick leave when needed. Validation exercises further show that the salience measure captures a distinct workplace characteristic not explained by industry affiliation or standard firm and workforce attributes.
CONCLUSIONS: Firms influence not only worker health outcomes but also how workers respond to health conditions. Greater organisational emphasis on employee well-being appears to affect health-related behaviour, potentially by reducing stigma surrounding sickness absence or increasing awareness of available leave. More broadly, the findings demonstrate that corporate disclosures can be used to measure otherwise unobserved workplace characteristics with meaningful consequences for workers.