CEO inside debt and employee workplace safety

Theoretical studies suggest that, when determining the workplace safety level, CEOs face a trade-off between ex ante safety-improving expenditures and the expected losses due to ex post injury and illness occurrences. We examine whether firms with higher CEO inside debt holdings have safer workplace...

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VerfasserInnen: Wu, Xuan (VerfasserIn) ; Li, Yueting (VerfasserIn) ; Yu, Yangxin (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
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Veröffentlicht: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2023
In: Journal of business ethics
Jahr: 2023, Band: 182, Heft: 1, Seiten: 159-175
weitere Schlagwörter:B J28
B CEO inside debt
B G30
B workplace safety
B Aufsatz in Zeitschrift
B K32
B M41
B Firm operational risk
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Zusammenfassung:Theoretical studies suggest that, when determining the workplace safety level, CEOs face a trade-off between ex ante safety-improving expenditures and the expected losses due to ex post injury and illness occurrences. We examine whether firms with higher CEO inside debt holdings have safer workplaces. Using establishment-level employee workplace injury and illness data, we find that CEOs’ inside debt holdings are negatively associated with employee workplace injury and illness cases. This relationship is more pronounced if workers’ compensation premiums are more sensitive to injury claims and for firms with more government business and less pronounced for firms with higher levels of secured debt. We provide some evidence that our main result stems from CEOs increasing safety investments. Our empirical results are shown to be robust under a batch of robustness tests and when considering potential endogeneity problems. Our findings suggest that CEOs with higher levels of inside debt holdings are more sensitive to wealth loss due to employee injury and illness, leading to a safer workplace.
ISSN:1573-0697
Enthält:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-021-05033-6