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Seminar in Economics |Better Labor Market Options Reduce Workplace Injuries with Anna Stansbury

Department of Economics welcomes you to a seminar with Anna Stansbury, MIT Sloan, who will present "Better Labor Market Options Reduce Workplace Injuries".

Welcome to this Higher Seminar in Economics organized by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Anna Stansbury, MIT Sloan, presenting "Better Labor Market Options Reduce Workplace Injuries".

Abstract

Are workers with worse outside options subject to greater health and safety risks in the workplace? A large body of work demonstrates that workers’ wages respond to their outside options in the labor market. Health and safety risk is an important part of workers’ welfare and non-wage compensation. To the extent that the provision of workplace health and safety is costly for firms, workers with better outside options may be more able to demand a safer workplace, or more able to leave their job, if workplace safety is not satisfactory. We investigate this relationship, using a shift-share instrumental variable strategy to generate plausibly exogenous shocks to workers’ wages in local jobs outside their occupation and estimating the effect of these shocks on workplace injuries, as measured using administrative data on the universe of workers’ compensation claims in California over 2002-2018. We find that a 1 log point improvement in workers’ outside-occupation options is associated with a 0.3-0.5 log point lower injury rate within the occupation, suggesting a substantial responsiveness of workplace health and safety to labor market conditions.

 

Anna Stansbury is the Class of 1948 Career Development Assistant Professor and an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is in the core faculty of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. Stansbury’s research focuses on topics in labor and macroeconomics, particularly on issues to do with inequality, power, and institutions in the labor market.

The seminar takes place at Stockholm School of Economics, Sveavägen 65, room 750.

Please contact fanni.antal@hhs.se if you have any questions.

Dept. of Economics Economics Seminar in economics