Wage Loss Monitoring for Injured Workers in California's Workers' Compensation System: 2013 Injury Year Findings (First Interim Report)

Abstract

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Do Temporary Workers Experience Additional Employment and Earnings Risk After Workplace Injuries?

“…A similar phenomenon explains the positive coefficients on the included job tenure categories. A U-shaped relationship between pre-injury wages and earnings losses is also consistent with Dworsky et al (2018).…”

“…Regional differences in earnings between urban and rural regions and between the Bay Area and other cities are also apparent. Cause of Injury and Nature of Injury codes are defined relative to very severe types of injuries (burn/scald and cumulative trauma), so the higher post-injury coefficients for the included categories are a reflection of more severe earnings losses in the excluded group, as reported in Dworsky et al (2018). A similar phenomenon explains the positive coefficients on the included job tenure categories.…”

“…Additional details on earnings data collection can be found inDworsky et al (2018), specifically Chapter 2 and the Appendix.8 Specifically, we reweighted the sample of complete records WCIS claims with matched EDD wage data so that the joint distribution of age, gender, geographic region within California, year and quarter of injury, firm size, and quartiles of annual pre-injury earnings matches the joint distribution of these variables among all observations with complete records on these variables.9 To avoid results being driven by very high earners, outliers were removed. The outlier threshold was defined by calculating the 99.8 th percentile of CPI-adjusted total earnings for each quarter in the analysis (before, during, and after the injury) for injured workers only, and taking the minimum value across quarters relative to injury.…”

Earnings Losses and Benefit Adequacy in California's Workers' Compensation System: Estimates for 2005–2017 Injury Dates

“…Over the past two decades, several large-scale workers' compensation policies have had significant impacts on disability benefits for injured workers. This discussion draws heavily on discussion of these policies from prior RAND reports, particularly Dworsky et al, 2016, andBroten, 2018a. We refer readers to these earlier reports for an extended discussion of these policies.…”

Demand Conditions and Worker Safety: Evidence from Price Shocks in Mining

“…These adverse events are both pervasive and extremely costly. In 2015 over 50 percent of workers reported being exposed to hazardous working conditions (Maestas et al, 2017), and 3 out of every 100 full-time workers experienced an occupational injury or illness 1 ; moreover, workers injured on the job face a subsequent earnings penalty of 8% on average, and 30% for permanent disability (Dworsky et al, 2018). Workplace injuries generate other direct costs like medical care, as well as indirect costs like lost productivity.…”