Seminarios

We evaluate the impact of providing different types of information to different agents within SMEs, using in a field experiment with four different interventions. In three cases, emails were sent to the manager providing either a summarized safety plan, a comparison of accident rates to firms in one’s sector or a monetization of the costs of accidents. In the fourth case, printed pamphlets were sent to workers (through the firm). We find that only this last intervention significantly lowered the accident rates of firms for as long as 12 months. The email comparing the firm’s accident rate to the sector average also reduced accidents but only for firms that were informed their accident rate was above the industry average. We find evidence that these two interventions raised the rate of safety training but that this is unlikely to be able to explain all of the decrease in accident rates. Finally, the workers’ package also moved firms’ wage distributions to the left, suggesting that managers were able to pass onto workers some of the safety improvement costs. All these results suggest that there are some asymmetric information problems within firms that limit safety improvements in small firms and that can be solved through providing specific information to specific agents.