Francesco Del Prato (Aarhus University)
Salvatore Lattanzio
Men experience workplace injuries at twice the rate of women. We study whether compensating differentials for injury risk contribute to gender differences in firm pay policies. We develop a search model microfounding an AKM wage equation that decomposes firm effects into productivity and injury-risk components. Using Italian administrative data with individual injury records, we estimate gender-specific firm wage effects and firm effects for injury risk. Injury channels explain 8 percent of the gender gap in firm effects, rising to 17 percent in manufacturing. Conditioning on occupation eliminates within-firm disparities, indicating the channel operates through between-firm sorting and within-firm occupational allocation.