the five years after an inspection and creates a $355,000 (2011 dollars) savings in work-
ers’ compensation expenses, roughly 14 percent of average annual payroll of the sample
of firms included in the study. The authors find no evidence that the improvement in
safety came at the expense of employment, payroll, sales, credit ratings, or firm survival.
The Levine et al. study is the only one finding OSHA inspections in general hav-
ing a large impact on worker safety. Their results are difficult to reconcile with previous
studies finding much smaller safety improvements from inspections with penalties. The ...
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