Risk management systems for occupational safety and health and the “Support incentives for enterprises” programme – Background, rules and some comments on an evaluation

Lisa Sella (CNR-IRCrES - National Research Council of Italy)
Elena Ragazzi (CNR-IRCrES)
Eva Dettmann (IWH & CNR-IRCrES)

Abstract

The ISI calls are a policy offering incentives to firms to invest in occupational safety and health. One measure of this policy is devoted to the adoption of systems to manage occupational risk (risk management systems, RMS now on). These are adaptive sets of actions undertaken by a firm to improve its preparedness to manage the emergencies and to reduce risks. In this paper we will show the results of new estimates on the impact of ISI incentives on the firms’ accident profile.
In previous papers based on this research (Sella, Ragazzi, Radin 2023; Sella, Ragazzi, Dettmann 2023), some impact of the incentives was detected, but the results were very volatile and not reliable. There are many possible explanations for this lack of robustness:
- Choice of the unit of observation (local unit vs whole firm)
- Sample size (even though our sample is not very small, accidents are very rare events, so large samples are required to detect the impact)
- The problem of non-compliance to assigned treatment (attrition and firms investing even without the incentive), which affects the credibility of the natural experiment evaluation setting
- The role of non-observables as factors conditioning the impact in OSH.
- The role of heterogeneity among yearly calls (in pooled estimations)
In this more advanced version of our research we tackle those problems.

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