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...

Workers with fixed-term contracts typically have worse health than workers with permanent contracts. We show that these differences in health translate into a substantially higher (30%) risk of applying for disability insurance (DI) in the Netherlands. Using unique administrative data on health...

Workers with fixed-term contracts typically have worse health than workers with permanent contracts. We show that these differences in health translate into a substantially higher (30%) risk of applying for disability insurance (DI) in the Netherlands. Using unique administrative data on health...

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...

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...

Over the course of the last half-century, the “injury in fact” test has been radically transformed. It began as a bold and essentially lawless effort, led by Justice William O. Douglas, to expand the category of persons entitled to bring suit, and in the process to open federal courts to a...

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...

The purpose of this study is to report return-to work rates from 218 persons with a compensable head injury. The data were extracted from a larger cohort of 1466 persons who had undertaken a vocational assessment (2001-2022) for determination of economic loss as part of a claim for compensation...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

By reducing risk of large out-of-pocket medical expenses, comprehensive social health insurance may reduce households' motivation to engage in precautionary behaviors such as saving, procurement of private insurance, and spousal labor-force participation. We use the natural experiment provided...

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...

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...

New Zealand has a unique accident insurance system that pays the direct costs of all accidental injuries and compensates workers 80% of their earnings for any time post-injury that they are unable to work. Statistics New Zealand's Linked Employer-Employee Database contains monthly information on...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Czech workers' compensation is "exemplified" by the adoption of the Worker's Accident Insurance Act in 2006, four deferments of its effective date and then complete annulment of the Act. A temporary settlement aimed at resolving the incompatibility of the communist model of workers' compensation...

We analyze product market competition between firm owners where the risk-neutral workers decide on their efforts and, thereby, on the output levels. Various worker compensation schemes are compared: a piece-rate compensation scheme as a benchmark when workers’ output performance is verifiable,...

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

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...

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...

This paper discusses the increased use of causation presumptions in workers' compensation cases involving firefighters and other first responders. It also considers increasing workers' compensation coverage of post traumatic stress disorder with respect to those same categories of workers.The...