Stefan Pichler and co-authors receive Science Award from German Health Economics Association

Stefan Pichler and his co-authors Johanna Catherine Maclean and Nicolas Ziebarth have won the Science Award (“Wissenschaftspreis”) 2026 of the German Health Economics Association (dggö). They received the award for their paper "Mandated Sick Pay: Coverage, Utilization, and Crowding-in", which was published in the Journal of the European Economic Association.

Stefan Pichler is an associate professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen, Johanna Catherine Maclean is an associate professor at the George Mason University (US), and Nicolas Ziebarth is a professor of economics at the University of Mannheim. In their paper, they study the coverage and utilization of mandated sick pay in the U.S. The authors examine what economic and societal consequences the introduction of paid sick leave has.

After analyzing the available data from the National Compensation Survey from 2009 to 2022, the researchers found that state-level sick pay mandates are effective in broadening access to paid sick leave for U.S. workers. Pichler, Maclean and Ziebarth discovered that increases in sick pay coverage reached 30 percentage points from a 63% baseline 5 years post-mandate. Mandates were also more effective in jobs with low pre-mandate coverage. Further, mandates reduced inequality in access to paid sick leave substantially, both across and within firms. The authors saw that COVID-19 reinforced existing upward trends in coverage and take-up. Five years post mandate, sick leave use has linearly increased to 2.4 days per year for marginal jobs. Finally, Pichler, Maclean and Ziebarth found crowding-in of non-mandated benefits, which they label as “job upscaling” by firms to differentiate jobs and attract labor.

The dggö science award

The German Health Economics Association (dggö) aims to foster science, research and scientific policy advice in the field of health economics. Its activities also include the organization of scientific events and research projects as well as the awarding of prizes and awards. The association promotes research in the field of health economics with a science award, the prize is awarded to the best publication in this field of the respective year. This year, the prize was awarded to two papers. Apart from Pichler, Maclean and Ziebarth, Markus Eyting and co-authors received a Science Award from dggö for their paper “A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia’’, that was published in Nature. The prize is endowed with €5,000, which will be shared between both research teams.

More information

Maclean, J. C., Pichler, S., & Ziebarth, N. R. (2025). Mandated sick pay: coverage, utilization, and crowding-in. Journal of the European Economic Association, 23(5), 1868–1907. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaf008

Questions? Please contact Stefan Pichler.