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The Dirtier You Breathe, The Less Safe You Are. The Effect of Air Pollution on Work Accidents

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Abstract
We estimate the effect of air pollution on work-related accidents and disabilities using administrative data from Italy in a setting characterized by strict air pollution and work safety regulations. Leveraging on winter heating rules to address the endogeneity of air quality, we find that a one unit increase in PM10 causes 0.014 additional accidents and 0.0014 disabilities. These results are robust to different model specifications and when we extend the geographical scale of the analysis using an alternative instrumental variable based on the height of planetary atmospheric boundary layer. We explore the theoretical implications of these findings and empirically confirm that firms have an incentive to deploy defensive investments also when the risk of accidents derives from external factors such as air quality. Our back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that each additional unit in PM10 concentration would increase the total cost of an accident by about 1.7%.

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  • Gabriele Curci & Domenico Depalo & Alessandro Palma, 2023. "The Dirtier You Breathe, The Less Safe You Are. The Effect of Air Pollution on Work Accidents," CEIS Research Paper 554, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 24 May 2023.
    • Handle: RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:554
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    Cited by:

    1. Katharina Drescher & Benedikt Janzen, 2023. "When Weather Wounds Workers: The Impact of Temperature on Workplace Accidents," Working Papers 226, Bavarian Graduate Program in Economics (BGPE).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    air pollution; workplace safety; work accidents; instrumental variable; winter heating;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • J28 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Safety; Job Satisfaction; Related Public Policy
    • J81 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Standards - - - Working Conditions
    • Q51 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Valuation of Environmental Effects
    • Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling

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