Does Cleaner Air Affect Workplace Safety

Does Cleaner Air Affect Workplace Safety? How Firms Balance Multiple Regulatory Demands (Job Market Paper) Most firms in the U.S. are simultaneously required to comply with standards set by multiple regulatory agencies. While these agencies act to promote compliance with their own standards, rarely (if ever) do they consider how their actions affect firms' ability to comply with standards in other regulatory domains. This paper investigates a consequence of this siloed approach to regulation by analyzing whether and why such regulatory spillovers may occur. On the one hand, heightened oversight in one regulatory domain may lead firms to substitute effort away from performance in other domains. On the other hand, if there are complementarities in the production function of compliance, the opposite could be true. To shed light on this question, I use quasi-random variation in air quality regulation induced by amendments to the Clean Air Act to study how environmental regulation affects plants' occupational safety and health regulatory compliance and performance. I find that, on average, air quality regulation leads plants to worsen their compliance with safety and health standards. The effect only holds for relatively small plants, where compliance efforts across domains are most likely substitutes, and there is no effect on standards for which compliance complementarities with air quality standards are most likely. Furthermore, air quality regulation leads plants to experience higher rates of injuries. Regulation by Shaming: Deterrence Effects of Publicizing Violations of Workplace Safety and Health Laws Ratings, scores and other forms of information disclosure are widely used to incentivize firms to improve their quality or performance. Increasingly, such policies are targeted to exclusively publicize firms whose performance is deemed particularly poor--i.e. through “shaming.” Shaming may affect the behavior of publicized firms (“specific deterrence”), and more broadly it may affect the behavior of other firms that may seek to avoid their own publicity (“general deterrence”). This paper studies a targeted disclosure policy in which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began issuing press releases about facilities found to be in violation of safety and health regulations if the penalties levied for those violations exceeded a cutoff. Using quasi-random variation induced by this cutoff, and the media sources to which these press releases were distributed, this paper finds that publicizing violations of one facility leads geographically proximate facilities in the same sector to improve their compliance with safety and health regulations and to experience fewer injuries. The effect sizes conservatively suggest that OSHA would have to conduct at least 40 additional inspections to achieve the same improvement in compliance as that achieved with a single press release. Finally, using geographic variation in the strength of labor unions, the paper provides suggestive evidence that employers improve safety following a press release to avoid costly responses from workers. Why Are Low-Wage Workers Signing Noncompete Agreements? with Michael Lipsitz Noncompete agreements (NCAs), which contractually limit where an employee may work in the event of a job separation, have been recognized as tools employers use to protect nonphysical production assets and to reduce turnover. However, recent evidence that NCAs are widely and increasingly used in lower-wage jobs suggests our understanding of NCA use remains incomplete. In this paper, we show that NCAs arise when employers and employees are limited in their ability to transfer utility via the wage. Our model of the labor market predicts that, when such limitations are present, the terms of trade may dictate that NCAs are used to transfer utility from the employee to the employer, even when NCAs reduce the pair's joint surplus. We find support for our model's predictions using a new survey of owners of independent hair salons, an industry in which NCAs are widely used. We find that declines in two distinct measures of the terms of trade for employees, and decreases in transferability of utility (measured by the state minimum wage), are associated with increases in NCA use. Furthermore, we generate a test for identifying when NCAs reduce a firm's joint surplus, and we identify a subset of firms in our sample, characterized by limited access to credit, for which this is the case. Finally, we revisit a recent study of the employment effect of the minimum wage; consistent with our model, we find the minimum wage has a negative effect on employment in states where NCAs are not enforced, and no effect in states where they are strictly enforced.