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

Donna Brown and Jonathan Wadsworth

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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)
JEL-codes: J28 J80 K32 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2022-06-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/117890/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

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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:ehl:lserod:117890

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