Workers' Compensation

Benefits, Costs, and Safety under Alternative Insurance Arrangements

Introductory chapter | Table of Contents

Thomason, Schmidle, and Burton make use of a unique data set to delve into how insurance arrangements affect several objectives of the workers' compensation (WC) program. They underscore the effects of deregulation and other changes in WC insurance pricing arrangements by performing empirical analyses that use state-specific cost, benefit, and injury data from 48 states for 1975-1995.

This allows them to address the interactive relationships among the four objectives of WC systems adequacy of benefits, affordability of WC insurance, efficiency in the benefits delivery system, and prevention of workplace injuries and diseases and how various public policies adopted by states or the federal government work to achieve them.

Several important contributions result. For instance, the authors quantify the tradeoffs between adequacy and affordability that would result from a federal mandate requiring adequate benefits. They also provide analysis of the possible tradeoffs in using different public policies regarding insurance arrangements, e.g., the expected savings to employers from deregulation of private insurance carriers.

Overall, their results clarify the complicated relationships between insurance arrangements and employers' costs, and the impact of regulation on employers' costs, WC insurance market structure, and workplace health and safety.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Developments in Workers' Compensation since 1960
3. Measuring Employers' Costs
4. Benefit Adequacy versus Affordability
5. Employer Costs
6. The Effect of Workers' Compensation Insurance Regulation - Theory and Prior Research
7. The Effect of Workers' Compensation Insurance Regulation - Evidence
8. Insurance Arrangements and Workplace Safety
9. Conclusions
10. Appendix A: Data on Workers' Compensation Costs, Benefits, and Insurance Arrangements
11. Appendix B: Insurance Terminology
12. Appendix C: Detailed Methodology for Measuring Employers' Costs of Workers' Compensation Insurance
13. Appendix D: Benefit Index Methodology
14. Appendix E: The Insurance Cycle
15. Appendix F: Insurance Commission Survey
16. Appendix G: Supplemental Regression Results

"This book succeeds on many fronts and is a must-buy for those working in social insurance, human resources, or public policy. The authors go to great pains to make the book accessible to the general reader. They explain technical points in good English and clearly spell out the public policy aspects of the research...this book will be a contender for several book of the year awards." John D. Worrall, Rutgers University, in The Journal of Risk and Insurance

Selected as a Noteworty Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, 2001, by Selected References, the Industrial Relations Section, Princeton Univeristy.

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