Research & Projects

This paper aims to estimate the existence and the amount of wage compensation arising from the risk of occupational accidents in French industry. 

Methodology

I  took data from the 2018 French employment survey to assemble a panel composed 4 quarters of observations for employed individuals. With this, an indicator of propensity to accidents at work is estimated by a transformation of the number of days of absence from work assuming a ”sickness” component and an ”accident” component. Starting from the classical Mincerian equation (1958), controls for sex and economic activity (industrial or not) are added to estimate random effects models per individual.

Results

Positive correlations are found for all the controls except sex, for which it is negative. In the process, the relevance of geographical variables and the type of hiring is discarded. Finally, it is found that occupations considered as risky present a reduction of -0.048 euros per hour in the French industrial sector and that, therefore, this is not a compensation for the risk assumed by the worker but a penalty. 

Check the document and the code here!: LINK

Mining does not produce; it extracts, which usually means an almost instantaneous return. This characteristic allows large capital investors to build mines or exploit rivers, but it also enables individuals with little more than basic tools to engage in smaller-scale operations—particularly when the output can be concealed. Given the absence of state institutions in some areas of Colombia, the high value of the resource creates opportunities for exploitation, either legally (by obtaining government permission) or illegally (by bypassing regulation). In both cases, this activity generates a significant capital flow that, under these conditions, can attract non-state armed actors. 

Results

As expected, higher crime rates are observed in municipalities where subsistence mining is present. This aligns with the hypothesis that armed groups are motivated by the profits of mining resources, perhaps due to the opportunity to camouflage their own illicit operations or to extort both authorized and unauthorized miners. Consistently, this suggests that the distribution of standard mining titles correlates slightly less with high crime levels—possibly because legal status enables access to external markets or because larger mining operations are more difficult to extort. 

Check the document and the code here!: LINK