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Does Regulatory Enforcement Work? A Panel Analysis of OSHA Enforcement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Wayne B. Gray  and
John T. Scholz
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Abstract

This study tests the impact of OSHA enforcement on workplace injuries. Using data on injuries and OSHA inspections for a panel of 6,842 large manufacturing plants between 1979 and 1985, we find significant specific deterrence effects. Inspections imposing penalties induce a 22% decline in injuries in the inspected plant during the following few years. We suggest that narrow deterrence perspectives have led to unduly pessimistic assumptions about enforcement effectiveness and that a managerial attention model is more consistent with our findings.

In a technical appendix we describe the Chamberlain technique, a powerful analytic approach for panel data that provides tests and corrections for potential biases endemic in enforcement studies, including unmeasured heterogeneity among units, serially correlated dependent variables, and endogeneity of inspections. We argue that more empirical studies of enforcement impacts are necessary to provide an appropriate perspective for descriptive and analytic studies appraising regulatory behavior.

Type
Examining Regulatory Impact
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , 1993 , pp. 177 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Carol Jones, Michael Klein, and seminar participants at the Law and Society annual meeting for helpful comments. This project would not have been possible without the cooperation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Special thanks are due to William Eisenberg at BLS and Frank Frodyma and Joe Dubois at OSHA. We are particularly indebted to John Ruser of BLS, who performed the data merging and solved numerous problems. The project was partially funded by NSF grant SES8420920. These institutions and individuals do not necessarily support the conclusions in this article.

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