Employment Hazards: An Investigation of Market Performance

The safety of the work place is now a highly visible public issue. Many are calling for tighter regulation to reduce worker risk, while others feel government intervention is ineffective and costly. Here Kip Viscusi explores how well markets for hazardous jobs actually work. According to classical economics, other things being equal, a worker will demand more pay for a hazardous job than a safe one. However, this assumes that job related hazards are known, when often they are not. Using rec...