PhD thesis defence by Ismael Moreno Martinez
This thesis consists of three essays in labor economics, focusing on workplace safety risks from environmental factors, the evolution of occupational fatality risk and earnings inequality, and the effects of financial sector changes on household economic security.
In the first chapter, co-authored with Benjamin Hattemer, we provide novel causal estimates of the effect of air pollution on workplace safety using data on the universe of work accidents reported in Spain (2010-2019). We focus on mineral dust precipitation, a near-worldwide natural source of air pollution. The results indicate a day of dust precipitation increases work accidents by 1.4 percent, with impacts of the same order of magnitude as those of high temperatures. Effects are widespread across worker and accident characteristics, consistent with dust pollution inducing human error across a broad range of tasks and activities.
In the second chapter, I document how occupational fatality risk and its distribution across earnings changed in the United States from 1992 to 2018 using CFOI and CPS data. Workplace fatality risk for male workers fell by about one third, from roughly 8.5 to 5.5 deaths per 100,000, with safety gains occurring primarily because occupations became safer rather than because workers shifted into safer jobs. The earnings–risk relationship changed markedly: by the late 2010s, safety gains were strongest at the bottom and top of the earnings distribution and weaker in the middle, producing an inverted-U pattern in risk. Under a compensating-differentials calibration, the average share of hourly earnings attributable to fatality risk compensation declined from 4.7.
In the third chapter, co-authored with Jin Cao, Kasper Roszbach, and Marina Sanchez del Villar, we investigate the impact of bank branch closures on household finances in Norway using a novel dataset of bank presence with individual tax records spanning 2004 to 2019. We find that households exposed to a bank branch closure experience significant declines in wealth, loan access, and home ownership rates, with evidence consistent with soft information losses driving the results.
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