CHILD-TO-TEACHER RATIO AND DAY CARE TEACHER SICKNESS ABSENTEEISM
利用丹麦日托机构数据，研究儿童教师比（每个教师照看的儿童数）对教师短期因病缺勤的影响，发现对托儿所教师有正向作用，但对学前班教师不显著。
The literature on occupational health points to work pressure as a trigger of sickness absence. However, reliable, objective measures of work pressure are in short supply. This paper uses Danish day care teachers as an ideal case for analysing whether work pressure measured by the child-to-teacher ratio, that is, the number of children per teacher in an institution, affects teacher sickness absenteeism. We control for individual teacher characteristics, workplace characteristics, and family background characteristics of the children in the day care institutions. We perform estimations for two time periods, 2002-2003 and 2005-2006, by using generalized method of moments with lagged levels of the child-to-teacher ratio as instrument. Our estimation results are somewhat mixed. Generally, the results indicate that the child-to-teacher ratio is positively related to short-term sickness absence for nursery care teachers, but not for preschool teachers.