I appreciate the careful review of the empirical literature; I certainly learned much about the difficulties of estimating the causal effects of OSHA inspections despite believing that the final estimates are somewhat unconnected to the claim that "OSHA actually delivers on its promise to protect workers from threats to their safety and health." This is because the relevant counterfactual in the context of NOSHA is not between safety outcomes in the presence/absence of OSHA inspections where OSHA requirements are already common knowledge. Rather, it is between those attained under OSHA versus under the private occupational safety regimes that firms would adopt in its absence. Even this may be misleading insofar as current OSHA standards may constrain workers' and firms' flexibility in trading off occupational safety for higher wages; this possibility is surfaced in the response to the 'Hidden Costs' objection, but the results cited there again don't address the relevant counterfactual.
My takeaway then is to increase my appreciation for the difficulty of attaining ecological validity for the noteworthy proposals of the day. That is, the degree to which a bill is noteworthy depends on the breadth of effects it would have on society, in turn lowering the likelihood that the relevant variation already exists for estimating the causal effects of interest.
Interesting detail on data quality around occupational injuries... this potentially applies to work-related ill health more broadly (work-related mental ill health, for example). Organisational data quality can be poor, regardless of what is reported. Better data quality would likely benefit organisations directly as well as feed in to broader workplace health and safety initiatives.
The argument regarding Social Security Disability Insurance treats that as a given. Why not couple eliminating OSHA with changes forcing employers to assume more of the costs of workplace injuries for which they are liable?
Great point! This is what Ladd and Neumark (2024) end up arguing in their analysis of SSDI data - that the government should do a better job of ensuring that people aren't "double dipping" (it's more an administrative challenge than a legal one because it's difficult to detect this kind of behavior).
One issue I immediately note is that medical benefits don't count for this purpose. That's obviously exploitable by manipulating what counts as a "medical" benefit, and I'm not clear what the policy justification for the exception is meant to be. If the goal is to keep people whose workplace injuries happened to require a lot of expensive medical care from ending up worse off because of that, well, life isn't fair and it's not the government's job to make it that way.
I appreciate the careful review of the empirical literature; I certainly learned much about the difficulties of estimating the causal effects of OSHA inspections despite believing that the final estimates are somewhat unconnected to the claim that "OSHA actually delivers on its promise to protect workers from threats to their safety and health." This is because the relevant counterfactual in the context of NOSHA is not between safety outcomes in the presence/absence of OSHA inspections where OSHA requirements are already common knowledge. Rather, it is between those attained under OSHA versus under the private occupational safety regimes that firms would adopt in its absence. Even this may be misleading insofar as current OSHA standards may constrain workers' and firms' flexibility in trading off occupational safety for higher wages; this possibility is surfaced in the response to the 'Hidden Costs' objection, but the results cited there again don't address the relevant counterfactual.
My takeaway then is to increase my appreciation for the difficulty of attaining ecological validity for the noteworthy proposals of the day. That is, the degree to which a bill is noteworthy depends on the breadth of effects it would have on society, in turn lowering the likelihood that the relevant variation already exists for estimating the causal effects of interest.
Interesting detail on data quality around occupational injuries... this potentially applies to work-related ill health more broadly (work-related mental ill health, for example). Organisational data quality can be poor, regardless of what is reported. Better data quality would likely benefit organisations directly as well as feed in to broader workplace health and safety initiatives.
The argument regarding Social Security Disability Insurance treats that as a given. Why not couple eliminating OSHA with changes forcing employers to assume more of the costs of workplace injuries for which they are liable?
Great point! This is what Ladd and Neumark (2024) end up arguing in their analysis of SSDI data - that the government should do a better job of ensuring that people aren't "double dipping" (it's more an administrative challenge than a legal one because it's difficult to detect this kind of behavior).
https://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/rb424.pdf
One issue I immediately note is that medical benefits don't count for this purpose. That's obviously exploitable by manipulating what counts as a "medical" benefit, and I'm not clear what the policy justification for the exception is meant to be. If the goal is to keep people whose workplace injuries happened to require a lot of expensive medical care from ending up worse off because of that, well, life isn't fair and it's not the government's job to make it that way.