Market forces, supplemented by government policy, affect how firms and households jointly determine product and workplace safety levels. After developing the economic theory of how labor and product markets pair prices and health risks we then explain the effects of the relevant government...

This paper examines the compensation systems for industrial accidents in Belgium, Germany and Great Britain, thereby taking into account some recent empirical data on industrial accident rates and (although hardly available) amounts of compensation paid out to employee victims. The key question...

Little is known about the economics of plaintiff-side law firms, which typically work on a contingency fee basis. We begin here to fill that gap. We report on the fees received by 124 plaintiff-side personal injury firms located in four states (Illinois, Texas, and two additional undisclosed...

In this paper, I explore the often-contested territory that tort occupies within the more expansive domain of worker's compensation. This exploration reveals that, far from being substitutes, tort and worker's compensation are, in fact, deeply and inextricably joined: A complementarity that...

In countries with workers' compensation schemes, employees receive compensation for injuries at work regardless of fault, while civil law liability of employers is either limited or fully excluded. Compensation schemes provide several instruments to partially restore employers' accountability...

This paper has been composed within the framework of the ‘Shifts in Governance’ project, financed by the Netherlands Association for Scientific Research (NWO). It reviews past empirical research on personal injury compensation systems, most of which has been conducted in the United States....

Federal courts have recently required proof of classwide injury to certify a class action for monetary remedies. Proof of classwide injury is defined as proof, which is common to the class, that the defendant's unlawful conduct injured every member of the class. This article argues that the...

Using standard as well as recently developed univariate and bivariate count data models, this paper analyzes the determinants of workplace accidents using a firm data set for Germany. Given the tight system of public workplace safety regulation, introduced partly as early as in 1869, and the...

This paper presents a theory and an empirical investigation on cyclical fluctuations in workplace accidents. The theory is based on the idea that reporting an accident dents the reputation of a worker and raises the probability that he is fired. Therefore a country with a high or an increasing...

The theory of compensating wage differentials is generally accepted. Still, there has been no strong or even contrary evidence for compensating wage differentials in Germany so far. Estimating wage regressions with data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) within individually perceived...