Shirking and Social Capital: evidence from skilled vs unskilled school workers

We study the relation between shirking behavior among workers in Italian public schools and the level of social capital across different regions. In particular, our analysis focuses on the role of regional (NUTS3 level) social capital on teachers’ absenteeism rates. Exploiting a rich dataset from MIUR, we control for a number or school and local characteristics. In addition, to address likely endogeneity problems in OLS results, we instrument social capital with the presence of different foreign dominations that ruled Italian regions between the 12th and 19th century before the creation of the unified Italian State. Our results suggest that past historical institutions play a role on the current social capital level and show that the latter has a significant effect on the absenteeism rate of teachers in Italian schools.