The Economy and Workplace Safety: Evidence from the Macro-Level
type: CreativeWork
description: Despite industry efforts to improve workplace safety, every year within the United States there remain over three million occupational injuries that occur on the job. To better understand these costly safety outcomes, I utilized a novel stressor, economic stress (Catalano & Dooley, 1983), to develop a cross-level theoretical model whereby economic stress influences workplace safety outcomes by exerting a nonlinear influence on individual safety performance. Using data from 42 states over 19 years (totaling 798 observations), I estimated a series of nested multilevel models to explain the state-level variability in workplace safety as a function of local economic conditions. Results showed support for the hypothesized nonlinear, “U-Shape” curve between workplace safety outcomes and the state of the macro economy. Safety outcomes improved as the state of the economy worsened until reaching a “tipping point” at approximately 3.94% above the state mean-level of unemployment. Practical implications are discussed in light of these findings, including the need for organizations to consider employing state-level safety interventions in response to severe macroeconomic stressors.
abstract: Despite industry efforts to improve workplace safety, every year within the United States there remain over three million occupational injuries that occur on the job. To better understand these costly safety outcomes, I utilized a novel stressor, economic stress (Catalano & Dooley, 1983), to develop a cross-level theoretical model whereby economic stress influences workplace safety outcomes by exerting a nonlinear influence on individual safety performance. Using data from 42 states over 19 years (totaling 798 observations), I estimated a series of nested multilevel models to explain the state-level variability in workplace safety as a function of local economic conditions. Results showed support for the hypothesized nonlinear, “U-Shape” curve between workplace safety outcomes and the state of the macro economy. Safety outcomes improved as the state of the economy worsened until reaching a “tipping point” at approximately 3.94% above the state mean-level of unemployment. Practical implications are discussed in light of these findings, including the need for organizations to consider employing state-level safety interventions in response to severe macroeconomic stressors.
author: Nordan, Alec
language: eng
keywords: Economic stress, Multilevel modeling
date published: 2017-08
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:32:24Z
provider: University of Houston
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Houston

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/10657/4813