Worker Risk Perception and Risk Valuation

In a adaptive job choice model, workers will quit their jobs in which the risks are too great unless they are rewarded sufficiently for remaining. The paper reports marginal value of safety estimates based on a new data collected from a personal interview of petrochemical workers.

The sample consisted of 602 employees. An important feature of this survey is that it directly measures respondent's perceived risks of accidental death and injury on the job. Hedonic wage results indicate that the perceived risk variables were not statistically significant at the conventional levels, although they had the expected positive signs.