Workers' compensation: Occupational injury insurance's influence on the workplace

Abstract

Worker's compensation provides health care and partial wage loss replacement to workers injured on the job. It is more complex in its scope and impact on workers than other social insurance both because it is a system of diverse state-based laws funded through private, public, and self-insuring entities, and because it has significant overlap with health insurance, unemployment insurance, and other employer-provided benefits. While research indicates strong incentive responses to the structure of indemnity benefits and medical reimbursements, future research will benefit from employing a worker-centric (rather than a program-centric) orientation using integrated databases that ultimately link workplace productivity to program characteristics.