Restricted Work Due to Workplace Injuries: A Historical Perspective

In anticipation of upcoming data on worker characteristics and on case circumstances surrounding workplace injuries that result in job transfer or restricted work, new tabulations look at trends in the outcome of workplace injuries over the past several decade

Workers' Compensation and Occupational Injuries and Illnesses.

A longitudinal establishment data set is used to assess the effect of changes in workers' compensation benefits on the incidence of lost-workday injury and illness cases in manufacturing for the years 1979-84. Higher benefits are found generally to increase lost-workday cases. However, consistent with theory, the benefit effect is smaller in larger, more highly experience-rated establishments. After initial estimates are obtained using ordinary and weighted least squares, several count data models are explored that are more appropriate for the integer industry and illness counts in the data. The results are consistent across the specifications. Copyright 1991 by University of Chicago Press.

Workers' Compensation and the Distribution of Occupational Injuries

This paper studies the impact of workers' compensation income benefits on injury rates and on the distribution of injuries by severity. I develop econometric models for correlated counts of injuries that are estimated on a longitudinal data set of 2,798 manufacturing establishments. I find that higher benefits increase the frequencies of most nonfatal injuries, but reduce the frequency of fatalities. Also, higher benefits increase the probability that a given injury involves days away from work, but reduces the chance that it is a fatality or a minor injury.

Workers' Compensation Insurance, Experience-Rating, and Occupational Injuries

This article examines how an increase in workers' compensation indemnity benefits affects injury rates when firms are experience-rated to varying degrees. The theoretical model shows that an increase in benefits has a smaller effect on injury rates in more highly experience-rated firms. Since an institutional characteristic of workers' compensation insurance is that larger firms tend to be more highly experience-rated, the empirically testable hypothesis is that there is a smaller relationship between benefits and injury rates in larger firms. The hypothesis is tested with injury rate regressions estimated by using data on 25 three-digit U.S. manufacturing industries for the years 1972-1979. Support for the hypothesis is found when the frequency of all injuries is the dependent variable, but the evidence for the hypothesis is less strong when the dependent variable is the frequency of lost-workday injuries.