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Does Sunlight Kill Germs? Stock Market Listing and Workplace Safety

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2022

Claire Y. C. Liang ,
Yaxuan Qi Open the ORCID record for Yaxuan Qi [Opens in a new window] ,
Rengong (Alex) Zhang  and
Haoran Zhu
Claire Y. C. Liang
Affiliation:
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business [email protected]
Yaxuan Qi*
Affiliation:
City University of Hong Kong College of Business
Rengong (Alex) Zhang
Affiliation:
City University of Hong Kong College of Business [email protected]
Haoran Zhu
Affiliation:
Southern University of Science and Technology Business School [email protected]
*
[email protected] (corresponding author)
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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This study highlights the positive impact of a stock market listing on workplace safety. We find that workplace injuries in publicly listed firms are lower than those in comparable private firms, and this effect relates to heightened monitoring by the media and regulators. The media pays more attention to public firms’ safety issues than to those of private firms, and the reduced media scrutiny due to local newspaper closures leads to greater increases in injuries in public firms. Regulators also monitor public firms more strictly, evidenced by a higher likelihood of nonroutine inspections and larger penalties for detected violations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , June 2023 , pp. 1645 - 1674
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington

Footnotes

We thank an anonymous referee, Mara Faccio (the editor), Kai Guo, Xiaoli Hu, Qianqian Huang, Will Shuo Liu, Jinzhi Lu, David McLean, Vladimir Mukharlyamov, Lee Pinkowitz, Elena Simintzi, Vicki Tang, Xiaoli Tian, John Wald, Michael Weisbach, Haibin Wu, Mengxin Zhao, Shan Zhao, Xiaofei Zhao, and seminar participants at China Europe International Business School, Georgetown University, City University of Hong Kong, and Southern University of Science and Technology for valuable comments. We thank compliance officers from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for providing helpful discussions in phone interviews. We thank Gao, Lee, and Murphy (2020) for providing data for local newspaper closures. We thank Tim Gray for the helpful editing. Yuan Cao, Yu Liang, Soohwan Song, Enhui Yan, Lorraine Yan, and Wenbo Yang provided excellent research assistance. All errors are our own.

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