Drivers and frictions of workplace accidents: an empirical investigation of cross-country European heterogeneity

This paper presents an empirical investigation on the determinants of workplace accidents across Europe and focuses on the extent to which production-system characteristics (employment sectoral risk, size of firms, temporary contracts), business cycle and socio-economic factors (GDP, level of investments, unemployment, education) and other territorial controls (crime index) might account for cross-country heterogeneity. We use Eurostat data, and our panel is composed of 27 European countries over the period 2010-2018. Implementing different functional forms and estimation methodologies (pooled OLS, panel fixed and random effects models, system-GMM and semiparametric fixed effects model), we find robust evidence that productive-system structural characteristics, business cycle controls and the other territorial variables are effective in explaining European cross-country heterogeneity. Moreover, we find evidence of a nonlinear relationship between GDP and occupational accidents.