SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DI DIRITTO ED ECONOMIA
Alessia Marrocco (Sapienza University of Rome)
Angelo Castaldo (Sapienza University of Rome)
Marco Forti (University of Foggia)
Abstract
Since 2010, the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (Inail) funds firms to improve Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) performance. This paper analyses if Inail’s policy in place in 2013 has an indirect effect on firms’ survival. Using a unique dataset provided by Inail, to account for a potential selection bias linked to the admistrative procedure of the subsidy, we first consider the Intention-to-Treat (ITT). ITT includes all randomized firms, according to treatment assignment, regardless of whether they are actually treated or not. However, the assignment effect estimate based on the ITT is conservative. Thereafter, the analysis provides a second estimate of the ISI initiative Average Treatment Effect (ATE) by removing the firms that were intended to be treated but were not. To this end, two types of matching methods (Nearest Neighbour and Propensity Score Matching) are applied to compare the firms that received funding (which defines the treatment variable) with those most similar in the not assigned group. The main result of the analysis reveals that the policy has a statistically significant effect on the survival probability and resilience of the firms. In particular, as expected, the conservative effect obtained with the ITT is lower than the post-matching ATE estimate. The main policy implications of this work is that extending the OSH policy mix to include not only regulation and enforcement (sticks), but also direct incentives (carrots), especially in the case of SMEs, could improve the average OSH levels in the business sector and, in an industrial policy perspective, the firms’ economic performance.