For millions of employees, the commuting is a routine but important component of daily life. With the rapid urbanization and increasing ownership of private vehicle, most of employees in urban China have experienced a heavy commuting burden [1], which is portrayed as “a plague that affects modern man” [2]. A large arrays of previous studies based on the optimal time allocation model firstly focused on the relationships between the commuting and the employees’ labor market performance [3, 4, 5]. With negative externalities of the sickness absence, the relationship between the commuting and sickness absence has been also attracted extensive attention in the discussions of occupational health policies [3, 6].
However, the debate whether the commuting has a positive effect on sickness absence or not has not been at a consensus theoretically yet. There are two kinds of different transmission channels applied to discuss it. For one hand, one transmission channel is that the absence for sickness might be affected positively by the commuting, that is, more time spent in commuting would induce employees to bargain for more additional days off [7]. Based on the theory of new welfare economics of well-being, a long journey from home-to-work is viewed as an activity of time-consumption, which is related with negative psychological and physical health outcomes [1, 8, 9]. Accordingly, the leisure time of employees for health-promoting plans, such as physical activities, relaxation and social participation may be crowded out by the longer commuting time [10]. As a result, longer commuting may increase the risk of health-related absence, which is regarded as the involuntary or unavoidable absenteeism. In addition, while leisure could be substituted for shirking by each other, there is more likely for shirking behaviors among those employees with a longer commute time [11], thereby increasing the probability of the voluntary or avoidable absenteeism. It implies that with the decreasing cost of absence, a longer commuting may lead to more benefit from their absence to ask for more leisure, which could be used for other purposes rather than for work [6]. Therefore, asking for “sickness” leave could be regarded as a result of rational decision.
For another, the second mechanism based on the theory of efficiency wage argues that the commuting time may be negatively related to the sickness absence, that is, individuals who choose to take a long commute must have been well compensated [6]. For instance, employers who are engaged in jobs involving a long commute always tend to pay their employees a higher salary to attract and retain them [9]. Hence, the willingness to take a long journey from home-to-work is associated with the higher work morale, which may weaken the motivation for the voluntary absenteeism [12]. Additionally, there is an unclear nexus between the commute and illness-related absence due to heterogeneous health effects of commutes across transportation modes [13, 14]. Active commuting tools, such as bicycles or walking, are related to increasing health-promoting activities significantly, which is beneficial for their physical health [13], and commutes could also act as an important buffer to keep in balance between work and private spheres, which has a negative effect on the sickness [15].
It is apparent that not only is the relationship between commuting and sickness absence theoretically ambiguous, but also it has still reached inconsistency in empirical studies. Using the cross-sectional data from London, Liepmann [16] found that there was no evidence supporting the commute-absence effect, while Kluger [17] revealed that there was a positive relationship between the commuting and absence in terms of the passive commuting. Hendriksen, Simons, Garre and Hildebrandt [18] further pointed out that the commuting had a negative effect on being absent among employees who cycled to work. An elaborate study conducted by Van and Gutiérrez-i-Puigarnau [3] suggested that a longer commuting might increase the likelihood of illness-related absence, but Künn-Nelen [13] did not draw the same conclusion by applying British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data. Conversely, Goerke and Lorenz [6] found a positive causality between changes in commuting distance on sickness absence from work. However, previous studies have two limitations as follows. Firstly, it is important to be aware that absence due to sickness is a multi-factorial phenomenon [19, 20]. Most of studies were carried out in the European developed labor market to explore the commute-sickness absence effect for portraying the work-life balance for employees, whereas the discussion in the undeveloped Context like China is still scant. Another limitation is that the mechanism linking the commuting and sickness is still unclear, whereas the debate whether the commuting – absence effect is transmitted through health-related outcomes of employees or shirking behaviors is under discussion.
To fill these gaps, this paper builds on previous studies by examining the effect of commuting on sickness absence. Within the scenario of China, we try to address these questions: Whether a longer commute has a significantly positive effect on illness-related absence from work or not? If it does, what is the potential transmission channel between the commuting and sickness-absence?
This study contributes to the literature in several distinct ways. Firstly, following Goerke and Lorenz [6], we apply a unique dataset of the 2013 Matched Employer-Employee Survey in China and the zero-inflated negative binomial model to explore the nexus between the commuting and absence due to sickness.
Secondly, this study attempts to discuss the potential mechanism linking the commuting and sickness absence in the context of China, confirmed by the estimation of the impact of commuting on health-related outcomes and work efforts.
Thirdly, the heterogeneous commuting-absence effects with respect to Hukou status, gender, patterns of commuting, scale of cities and types of companies are taken into full consideration within the context of China.
The remainder of this study is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the data, including a discussion of descriptive statistics and presents the econometric method. All main empirical findings are given in Sect. 3. The discussion about the transmission channel between the commuting and sickness-absence as well as its heterogeneous effects is presented in Sect. 4. Finally, Sect. 5 will summarize all findings, policy implications and limitations of present study.