PEOPLE increasingly cover up accidents at work when the economy is in recession. The new finding has important implications for safety audits, which depend on accurate accident statistics.
It is known that accident rates at work fall as unemployment goes up, and vice versa. Several possible explanations for this have been suggested. One is that the workers companies take on during boom times are not as competent as the ones they keep in the lean years.
But Jan Boone and Jan van Ours of Tilburg University in the Netherlands suspected the dip might be due to under-reporting. Although there are…
