Heat Stress: Ambient Temperature and Workplace Accidents in the US

Lucy Page and Stephen Sheppard

No 2019-05, Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College

Abstract: Combining records for 71,225 severe accidents from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration with a panel of county-level weather data for 1990 to 2010, we find that heat shocks significantly increase accident rates across the United States, while cold shocks significantly reduce them. We find that heat shocks increase accidents both in plausibly temperature-sensitive industries, like construction and agriculture, and among industries that are not obviously sensitive to weather. While we find suggestive evidence of short-term adaptation to heat shocks over summer months, we find no evidence that the impacts of heat shocks have fallen over our 21-year panel.

JEL-codes: I18 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2019-04-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-hea and nep-lma
Note: Revision of earlier 2016 version
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