Accidents will happen: (de)regulation of health and safety legislation, workplace accidents and self employment

Donna Brown and Jonathan Wadsworth

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: In 2015, the UK government exempted "low-risk" self-employed workers from legislation on workplace safety. This reversed a move two decades earlier that incorporated the self-employed more fully into the same regulatory framework as employees. This paper examines whether workplace accidents among self-employed workers shifted after these two changes to safety regulations. A difference-in-differences estimation framework suggests that the extension of regulation in 1999 had little impact on relative accident rates. In contrast, after 2015, accident rates for high and low risk self-employed converged, driven primarily by a steep fall in accident rates among those still covered by legislation.

Keywords: non-fatal workplace accidents; self employed; de-regulation; health and safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-06-22
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Working Paper: Accidents will happen: (de)regulation of health and safety legislation, workplace accidents and self employment (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1855

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