Journal Article
The economic consequences of accidents at work
Publication details
Summary
This paper investigates the economic consequences of workplace accidents in the British labour market. For the empirical analysis, I use data on employment and earnings from the British Household Panel Survey and exploit fixed effects estimators to control for time‐invariant unobserved workers’ characteristics. I provide evidence that accidents at work negatively affect both job opportunities and workers’ earnings. First, employment probabilities following a state of injury are significantly lower. This effect persists over time and is stronger in those regions where unemployment rate is higher. Second, a serious workplace accident also results in significant delayed wage penalties, which increase with the accident's seriousness.