Spillover effects of innovation policies on workplace accidents in Europe

Alessia Marrocco (Sapienza University of Rome)
Angelo Castaldo (Sapienza Univesrity of Rome)
Guido Jacopo Micheli (Politecnico of Milan)
Gaia Vitrano (Politecnico of Milan)
Alessandro Marinaccio (Inail)

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical investigation on the determinants of workplace accidents and focuses on the extent to which public expenditure on R&D&I affects the workplace accidents trend in Europe, while controlling for production-system characteristics (employment sectoral risk, size of firms, temporary contracts), business cycle and socio-economic factors (GDP, level of investments, unemployment, education) and other territorial features (quality of the institutions, crime index).
We use Eurostat data, and our panel is composed of 27 European countries over the period 2005-2019. Implementing different functional forms and estimation methodologies (pooled OLS, panel fixed and random effects models, system-GMM and semiparametric fixed effects model), we find robust evidence that the overall levels of public support schemes for innovation, while controlling for the productive-system characteristics, the business cycle and other territorial variables are effective in explaining the evolution over time of the occupational accident rates.

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