Volume 26, Number 4 (Fall) 1991
Gray, Wayne B. and Carol Adaire Jones. 1991. "Longitudinal Patterns of Compliance with OSHA Health and Safety Regulations in the Manufacturing Sector." Journal of Human Resources 26(4):623-653.
We examine the impact of Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforcement on compliance with agency regulations in the manufacturing sector, with a unique plant-level data set on inspections and compliance during 1972-83, the first 12 years of the agency. The analysis suggests that, for an individual plant, the effect of OSHA inspections during this period was to reduce the level of citations on average by 3.1-3.5, or approximately half of the first inspection average of 6.3 citations. The total effect on expected citations of OSHA inspections can be decomposed into two parts: evaluated at the mean of the sample predictions, half of the total reduction in citations occurred due to previous violators coming into compliance and half was due to a reduction in citations among plants that continued to violate the standards.
Wayne B. Gray is an assistant professor of economics at Clark University, Worcester, Mass., and an economist with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass. Carol Adaire Jones is a senior economist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, Rockville, Md. The authors are grateful to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for providing the data to analyze in this paper. They also would like to acknowledge the useful comments of John Bound, Charles C. Brown, John Scholz, Richard C. Porter, V. Kerry Smith, and three anonymous referees, as well as participants at the 1987 Law and Society conference, the 1987 AERE Workshop on Monitoring And Enforcement, and the 1988 NBER Summer Institute in Labor Studies, where the authors presented early versions of this paper. The research was supported by NSF Grant SOS-86-10021, the Gilbert F. White Fellowship at Resources for the Future, and a University of Michigan Rackham Fellowship. The authors claim sole responsibility for any errors. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in March 1992 through March 1995 from Wayne B. Gray, Department of Economics, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610-1477.
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