Effect of state workplace safety laws on occupational injury rates.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of four common types of mandatory state-level workplace safety regulations on injury severity rates during the period 1992 to 1997 for the manufacturing sector. The full Poisson regression model showed safety committee regulations to have a highly significant reducing effect on injury rates, chi 2 (1, n = 3286) = 10.1774, P = 0.0014. Safety program regulations were significant at the alpha = 0.10 level, chi 2 (1, n = 3286) = 3.5676, P = 0.0589. The effect of insurance carrier loss control regulations in the full model was nonsignificant. However, insurance carrier loss control regulations were highly significant (alpha = 0.01) in the final reduced model. Targeting initiatives were nonsignificant in both the full and reduced models (alpha = 0.05). The study results are important to state and federal agencies considering adopting workplace safety regulations that are similar to the four types evaluated in this study.