Workplace Injury Risk and the Gender Wage Gap

Francesco Del Prato and Salvatore Lattanzio

No 26081, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: Men experience workplace injuries at roughly twice the rate of women. We study whether compensating differentials for injury risk contribute to gender differences in firm pay policies. We develop a search model that microfounds an AKM wage equation, decomposing firm pay effects into productivity and injury-risk components. Using Italian matched employer-employee data with individual injury records, we estimate gender-specific firm wage effects and firm-level injury risk. We find that injury-related channels account for 8 percent of the gender gap in firm wage effects, rising to 17 percent in manufacturing. While women receive only 86 percent of men's wage response to firm-level injury risk, conditioning on broad occupation eliminates this within-firm disparity. This indicates that the injury channel reflects sorting across firms and occupational allocation within firms, rather than differential pricing of identical risk.

Keywords: Gender wage gap; workplace injuries; compensating differentials; AKM; rent sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J28 J31 J64 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-lma
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crm:wpaper:26081

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