Effects of dialogue meetings on sickness absence -Evidence from a large field experiment

Sickness absence entails large individual and societal costs. Dialogue Meetings (DMs) where the absentee, the employer, and the physician discuss arrangements for full or partial work resump-tion have been in place in Norway since 2007. In collaboration with the Labour and Welfare Ad-ministration, we conducted a large-scale, pre-registered, randomized field experiment to evaluate aspects of the Norwegian DMs policy. We do not find statistically significant effects of summon-ing to a meeting and we can reject even small threat (notification) effects of sending out letters. We also conduct an extensive search for heterogeneous treatment effects but find no evidence of these.