Job Market
Well-being salience in corporate disclosures and worker health
Di Francesco, R., Hull, P. & Menon, S.
We study how firms' orientation toward employee well-being shapes the health of their workers. Because this orientation is not directly observable, we measure it from the language Danish firms use in their public disclosures, applying language models to construct a firm-level well-being salience score. We link this score to population-wide administrative registers of health and work absence over 2013–2022, and exploit workers' mobility between firms to estimate how worker health responds to a change in the salience of their employer. We find an asymmetry: workers who move to higher-salience firms take substantially more sickness absence, while their use of mental-health care does not change. Because worsening health would raise both, the absence response reflects behavior rather than deteriorating health. Our results show that firms shape not only worker health but how workers act on it, and that the language of routine corporate disclosure can be read for economically meaningful features of the workplace that administrative data leave unrecorded.
