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. This paper studies how failing to account for this incentive problem may result in ineffective safety interventions. We evaluate a policy introduced to curb excessive driving in trucking, an industry in which workplace accidents often generate a public safety externality. The policy inadvertently heightened the payoff for other unsafe driving practices, such as speeding, including during unsafe weather. Using data on 1.4 million truck crashes across the continental United States, we first show that truck crashes increase by 150 to 220 percent on days with icy weather. Leveraging the fact that the policy was binding for only a subset of truckers, we find that it led those truckers to experience 7 percent more crashes in icy conditions relative to a no-policy counterfactual. We then descriptively consider how alternative policy measures might affect safety and aggregate social welfare.
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
Better Labor Market Options Reduce Workplace Injuries
with R. Jisung Park and Anna Stansbury (revise and resubmit, Journal of Public Economics)
Why Environmental Economics Can’t Avoid the Jobs Question
with E. Mark Curtis and R. Jisung Park (submitted)
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)
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
Successful Transitions out of Fossil Fuel Jobs
with E. Mark Curtis, R. Jisung Park, and Eleanor Krause
