TY  - SER
AU  - Johnson, Matthew S.
AU  -  Koval, Patrick
AU  -  Schwab, Daniel
TI  - Legal Protection against Retaliatory Firing Improves Workplace Safety
SN  - 0034-6535
PB  - The Review of Economics and Statistics
KW  -  Legal Protection
KW  -  Retaliatory Firing
KW  -  Workplace Safety
KW  - Public Policy
N2  - Workplace safety policies are designed to ensure that employers internalize the costs of injuries, but employers can undermine these policies with threats of dismissal. We show that states’ adoption of the public policy exception to at-will employment—an exception forbidding employers from firing workers for filing workers’ compensation claims or for whistleblowing—led to a substantial reduction in injuries. The widespread adoption of the public policy exception explains 14% of the decline in fatal injury rates between 1979 and 1994. Statutory protections from retaliatory firing also improved safety, but only when employers faced sufficiently strong penalties for violating them
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01225
ER  -