The Barriers to Workers' Safety in SMEs: Lessons Learned from a Set of RCTs

We evaluate the impact of providing different types of information to different agents within SMEs in a field experiment with four different interventions. In three cases, we emailed the manager providing either a... [ view full abstract ]

We evaluate the impact of providing different types of information to different agents within SMEs in a field experiment with four different interventions. In three cases, we emailed the manager providing either a summarized safety plan, a comparison of accident rates in one's sector or a monetization of the costs of accidents. In the fourth case, printed pamphlets were sent to workers (through the firm). We find that only this last intervention significantly lowered the accident rates of firms for as long as 12 months. The email comparing the firm's accident rate to the sector average reduced accidents but only for firms that were informed their accident rate was above the industry average. We find evidence that these two interventions increased safety training but that this is unlikely to be able to explain all of the decrease in accident rates. Finally, the workers' package also moved firms' wage distributions to the left, suggesting that managers were able to pass onto workers some of the safety improvement costs. All these results suggest that there are some asymmetric information problems within firms that limit safety improvements in small firms and that can be solved through providing specific information to specific agents.