Regulation by Shaming: Deterrence Effects of Publicizing Violations of Workplace Safety and Health Laws

The American Economic Review, 2020

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Publicizing firms’ socially undesirable actions may enhance firms’ incentives to avoid such actions. In 2009, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began issuing press releases about facilities that violated safety and health regulations. Using quasi-random variation arising from a cutoff rule OSHA followed, I find that publicizing a facility’s violations led other facilities to substantially improve their compliance and experience fewer occupational injuries. OSHA would need to conduct 210 additional inspections to achieve the same improvement in compliance as achieved with a single press release. Evidence suggests that employers improve compliance to avoid costly responses from workers. (JEL J28, J81, K32, L51, M54)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a0c4eec304fd84dc145eb05002e84d712a45808

Citations in the corpus

• Mandatory CSR and sustainability reporting: economic analysis and literature review (2019, unknown): “Relatedly, Johnson (2020) examines whether the disclosure of one firm’s undesirable actions incentivizes its peers to avoid similar behavior.”