Research

Job Market Paper

Worker Incentives and Occupational Safety: Evidence from Weather-Induced Truck Crashes
with Sika Gadzanku

Abstract

In the presence of labor market failures, workers may have financial incentives that penalize safety. We study this question in the context of trucking, an industry that ships over two thirds of all freight in the United States, and a setting in which workplace accidents often generate a public safety externality. Using data on 1.4 million truck crashes across the continental United States, we first show that icy weather poses a uniquely strong occupational hazard to truckers: a wet day between -5°C and 0°C increases crashes by 153 percent, an effect that is over twice as large as that for all-vehicle accidents. We then evaluate a policy introduced to curb excessive driving, but one that inadvertently heightened truckers’ incentives to engage in other unsafe driving practices, such as speeding. The policy increased the ice-crash relationship by 28 percentage points, highlighting the importance of considering workers’ incentives when designing labor market interventions that aim to promote safety.

Published Articles

Occupational Mobility and Climate Adaptation: Evidence from France
Ecological Economics | 2026

Hot Weather, Undernutrition, and Adaptation in Rural India
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists | 2026 | with Manisha Shah and Alan Barreca
VoxDev Article | Featured on UNDRR PreventionWeb and Ideas for India

Use of Google Earth Engine for Teaching Coding and Monitoring of Environmental Change: A Case Study among STEM and Non-STEM Student
Sustainability | 2023 | with Ileana A Callejas, Liana Huang, Marisol Cira, Benjamin Croze, Christine M Lee, Taylor Cason, Elizabeth Schiffler, Carlin Soos, Zichan Wang, Shanna Shaked, Moana McClellan, Wei-Cheng Hung, and Jennifer A Jay

High temperatures and electricity disconnections for low-income homes in California
Nature Energy | 2022 | with Alan Barreca and R. Jisung Park

Environmentally Optimal, Nutritionally Sound, Protein and Energy Conserving Plant Based Alternatives to U.S. Meat
Scientific reports | 2019 | with Gidon Eshel, Alon Shepon, and Akshay Swaminathan

Working Papers

Local Labor Market Conditions and Adaptation to Climate Change: The Role of Workers’ Outside Options
with R. Jisung Park, Nora Pankratz, and A. Patrick Behrer (submitted)

Better Labor Market Options Reduce Workplace Injuries
with R. Jisung Park and Anna Stansbury (submitted)

Workplace heat burdens the poor and young: Quantifying individual climate risk in the US labor market
with A. Patrick Behrer and R. Jisung Park (draft available upon request)

Works in Progress

Why Environmental Economics Can’t Avoid the Jobs Question
with E. Mark Curtis and R. Jisung Park

Successful Transitions out of Fossil Fuel Jobs
with E. Mark Curtis, R. Jisung Park, and Eleanor Krause