Collective Safety: The Impact of Right-to-Work Legislation on Workplace Injury Rates

I analyze the extent of the effect of Kentucky’s 2017 right-to-work (RTW) legislation on injury rates, using workplace-level injury data from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s Injury Tracking Application. The main specification uses a difference-in-differences model to estimate the causal impact of the RTW law on injuries and total days away from work at Kentucky workplaces, where Ohio is used as a control group. I also perform the same analysis on the sample of workplaces within the Cincinnati metropolitan area. The results suggest that the RTW law potentially reduced injury rates in Kentucky workplaces, thereby improving workplace safety. As a second avenue of analysis, I use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to determine how much of the difference in injury rates is due to pretreatment level differences in workplace characteristics, namely workplace size and sector. These differences explain little variation in the differences in injury rates between Kentucky and Ohio.