Despite presenting potentially significant challenges and opportunities, the possible implications for workplace health and safety (WHS) of future-of-work trends have so far received scant attention. This paper, therefore, empirically examines the relationship between future-of-work trends and...

This paper analyzes the importance of doctor discretion in medical evaluations. Leveraging comprehensive administrative data and random assignment of doctors to evaluations in workers' compensation insurance, we identify the scope for doctor discretion in medical evaluations of injured workers...

Market responses to legislative reforms often mitigate the expected gains that reformers promise in legislation. Contemporaries hailed workers' compensation as a boon to workers because it raised the amount of post-accident compensation paid to injured workers. Despite the large gains to...

We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and matched Social Security Administration (SSA) data to study two questions. First, we examine evidence on whether workers who suffer permanently disabling injuries covered by workers’ compensation (WC) subsequently end up on Social...

Nearly every state has amended workers’ compensation laws in the last two decades and the national averages of cash and medical benefits paid per covered worker have declined. As a result, writers have suggested that the states might be cutting back on workers’ compensation benefits. We show...

Optimal insurance benefit design requires understanding how coverage generosity impacts individual behavior, insured costs, and welfare. Using unique administrative data, we leverage a sharp increase in the maximum weekly wage replacement benefit in a difference-in-differences research design to...

We exploit recent decades of US state-level reforms to the generosity of workers’ compensation programs to estimate the associated moral hazard, utilizing an event- study design and analyzing 9 separate reform categories. The reforms vary - some affecting benefit size, some the probability of...

During the days of Covid-19, OSHA has been much in the news as contests surface over the boundaries of what risks of workplace harm are properly regulable by the federal government. Yet the original statute that created OSHA—the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970—was not exclusively...

We estimate the causal effect of attorney involvement on the indemnity benefits workers receive after their injuries. To address the fundamental challenge that claims and injuries may differ on unmeasured dimensions that affect both attorney involvement and benefits received, we propose and use...

We study the effect of state recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) on workers' compensation (WC) benefit receipt among adults 40-62 years. We find that WC receipt declines in response to RML adoption both in terms of the propensity to receive benefits and benefit amount. We estimate complementary...

This paper examines the effect of workers' compensation on the time until an injured worker returns to work. Two large increases in the maximum weekly benefit amount in Kentucky am Michigan are examined. The increases raised the benefit amount for high earnings individuals by over sixty percent,...

A central question concerning the economic motivation for the adoption of workers' compensation is the extent to which workers had access to their desired levels of private accident insurance around the turn of the century. If insurance were rationed then workers' primary option would have been...

My goal is to construct a compensation program for victims of gun violence. If the victim was killed or suffered serious injury through a negligent or intentional shooting, the survivor recovers stepped compensation. The claimant files a request for compensation with the new Second Amendment...

Occupational titles may purposely misdirect observers from actual job tasks to reduce costs from mandatory benefits. Using the universe of OSHA accident audits, 1990-2009, we estimate the wage differentials paid for risk incurred performing tasks outside of occupation-associated duties. We...

States have responded to COVID-19's ongoing workplace disruptions with myriad workers' compensation policy changes. While some states have extended presumptions of coverage to a large swath of workers who are at risk of contracting COVID-19 on the job, others have been far more measured or have...

Steady increases in the costs of medical care, coupled with a rise in the fraction of workers who lack medical care insurance, have led to a growing concern that the Workers' Compensation system is paying for off-the-job injuries. Many analysts have interpreted the high rate of Monday injuries...

On November 7, 2017, Travis Chiokai, a lineman for Irby Construction, plummeted 100 feet to the ground after the line suspending him from a helicopter was severed. Travis died at the scene. At the time of his accident, Chiokai was living with and engaged to Latashia Perez, who was pregnant with...

Although workers, employers, and insurance companies by 1910 supported the adoption of workers' compensation, they fiercely debated the specific features of the legislation. In this paper we examine how workers' compensation benefit levels were determined in the political process of forging...

This paper uses a new administrative micro-data set to examine the effect of a legislated increase in the minimum and maximum workers' compensation benefit on the duration of workplace injuries in Minnesota. As a result of legislation, workers in some earnings groups received higher benefits if...

After the U.S. declared COVID-19 a pandemic, cracks in the U.S.’s fragile privatized healthcare system were exposed. At the start of the pandemic, 74 million U.S. residents were already uninsured or underinsured. To date, over 7.7 million recently terminated employees have lost their...

Several reasons are offered why workers will receive larger compensating wage differentials for increases in the duration of wage losses than for increases in the probability of loss that produce the same expected loss. A formal model of occupational choice is developed that shows the extent to...

This chapter examines the labor supply effects of social insurance programs. We argue that this topic deserves separate treatment from the rest of the labor supply literature because individuals may be imperfectly informed as to the rules of the programs and because key parameters are likely to...

While the Federal expanded benefits are ending for many workers on Labor Day, Workers’ Compensation Benefits are still available for those workers who have been exposed to COVID at work and contract disease and remain ill from Long COVID. Workers’ Compensation Benefits (Temporary, Medical,...

This essay performs a close analysis of workers’ compensation coverage of COVID-19 and arrives at the conclusion that it should not be “impossible” to prove in a legal sense that an employee’s COVID-19 was caused by work. Scientific proof is not the same as legal proof: workers’...

Workers' compensation insurance provides cash payments and medical benefits to workers who incur a work-related injury or illness. Many features of the workers' compensation program parallel features of proposed mandated employer-paid health insurance plans. This paper empirically examines the...

This paper provides an analysis and summary of the effects of the Workers' Compensation (WC) system on wages and work injury experience. It stresses how lessons learned from other forms of social insurance can be applied to research on WC. I begin with a brief overview of the characteristics of...

With life in the United States becoming more sedentary each day, the question arises as to what harm we are doing to our bodies when we sit at work for eight hours. As many studies have shown, sitting for prolonged periods of time is quite deleterious to our health. This Article addresses the...

We analyse the impact of harmonising workplace health and safety laws in Australia on workplace injury and disease by estimating effects on the probability of receiving workers compensation in the past year. The introduction of the reform in all but two Australian states created a unique,...

Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question - especially lately, as worker representation is widely promoted as an important way to ensure the interests and views of the workers. To investigate this...