Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm

Thanks to Abhijit Banerjee, Vittorio Bassi, Lauren Bergquist, Hoyt Bleakley, Julia Cajal Grossi, Lorenzo Casaburi, Sylvain Chassang, Rachel Glennerster, Pinar Keskin, Francine Lafontaine, Rocco Macchiavello, Bentley Macleod, Jim Malcomson, Ameet Morjaria, Kaivan Munshi, Dina Pomeranz, Debraj Ray, Ben Roth, Raffaella Sadun, Heather Schofield, Jagadeesh Sivadasan, Eric Verhoogen, Chris Woodruff, Dean Yang, and seminar participants at EPED Montreal, Minnesota, Montana, UVA, Michigan, Hawaii, Indian Statistical Institute, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, NBER, Boston College, U. of Houston, Graduate Institute Geneva, Zurich, and Wellesley for helpful comments. Thanks to Smit Gade and Varun Jagannath for help in conducting manager interviews. Thanks to Esther Lee for helping us compile festival dates. Thanks also to Cristian Chica for excellent research assistance. Adhvaryu and Nyshadham are cofounders, on the board of directors, and serve as Chief Development Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, respectively, of Good Business Lab, a non profit organization based in India which conducted the survey data collection for the study. Neither has any financial interest in Good Business Lab’s activities. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.