LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Alison D. Morantz
Stanford University Law School
Rejecting the Grand Bargain: What Happens When Large Companies
Opt Out of Workers' Compensation?
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
4:10 – 5.45
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
Texas is the only state that has always permitted employers to opt out of workers’ compensation, and in which many firms have done so. This study examines data from fifteen large, multistate firms that provided their Texas employees with private occupational injury insurance plans in lieu of workers’ compensation between 1998 and 2010. My preferred estimates suggest that these firms spent 44% less per worker hour than they did under workers’ compensation, due to declining claim frequency and cost per claim. Non-traumatic injury claims responded the most, consistent with the presence of incentive effects. Yet severe, traumatic injury claims, considered the least prone to incentive effects, also fell significantly. Four salient plan features – non-coverage of permanent partial disabilities, exclusion of many diseases and non-traumatic injuries, capped benefits, and lack of chiropractic care – explained surprisingly little of the observed cost savings.
Bio: A scholar whose work has explored the law and economics of protective labor regulation, the enforcement of workplace safety laws, and legal history, Alison D. Morantz seeks to parse the real–world effects of legal and policy reform. Much of her recent empirical research examines the effects of unionization on mine safety and the intensity of regulatory scrutiny, the ways in which statistical techniques can be used to target the nation’s most hazardous employers, the consequences of permitting firms to opt out of workers’ compensation, and the impact of devolving enforcement authority from federal to state regulators. Morantz is the principal investigator of multi–year research projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. In the spring of 2010, she was one of four experts appointed, at Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis’s request, to a federal panel that provided an independent analysis of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s internal review following the explosion at Upper Big Branch Mine on April 5, 2010, that claimed 29 miners’ lives. After receiving a BA summa cum laude from Harvard in 1993, Morantz earned an MSc from Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship; a JD from Yale Law School; and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. She subsequently clerked for Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and worked as a union–side labor lawyer and antidiscrimination advocate in Boston, before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2004.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
