Does Publicizing Enforcement Deter Future Crime? Evidence from Press Releases on Workplace Safety Compliance

This paper asks whether publicizing firms’ regulatory performance influences their subsequent compliance behavior in the domain of workplace safety. It utilizes a policy change by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) whereby it started issuing a press release detailing safety and health violations found during an inspection if that inspection resulted in financial penalties exceeding a certain threshold. Such a policy admits a regression discontinuity (RD) research design to estimate the causal effect of these press releases—and the publicity arising from them—on the subsequent compliance behavior of those workplaces affected by the press release. The results provide no evidence that publicity arising from press releases affects the probability of being inspected again in the future, either for the establishment about which it is written (”specific deterrence”) or other establishments in its same zip code and industry (”general deterrence”). However, conditional on a future inspection, a press release leads to higher compliance in both the ”specific” and ”general” sense, though the specific deterrence estimates are imprecise and not statistically significant. The general deterrence effects are stronger when the reputational costs of poor workplace safety are more increasing, and they appear to dissipate over time the longer the policy has been in place. These results can potentially provide insight into the extent to which workplace safety and health are valued by the general public and in the labor market. ∗I wish to thank Johannes Schmieder for invaluable advising and David Weil for helpful discussion. I would also like to thank the staff at each of OSHA’s regional Office of Public Affairs for providing me with details on OSHA’s press release policies. All errors are mine and mine alone.