TY  - JOUR
AU  - Fishback,Price V.
AU  - Kantor,Shawn Everett
TI  - The Adoption of Workers' Compensation in the United States 1900-1930
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5840
PY  - 1996
Y2  - November 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5840
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5840.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Price V. Fishback
Department of Economics
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ  85721
Tel: 520/621-4421
Fax: 520/621-8450
E-Mail: pfishback@eller.arizona.edu

Shawn E. Kantor
Department of Economics
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Sage Laboratory, 3404
110 Eighth Street
Troy, NY 12180
Tel: 518-276-3925
E-Mail: kantos@rpi.edu
AB  - The adoption of workers' compensation in the 1910s, from a variety of perspectives, was a significant event in the economic, legal, and political history of the United States.  The legislation represented the first instance of a widespread social insurance program in the United States, setting the stage for the later adoption of federal government programs for unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and health insurance.  In this paper, we show that the adoption of workers' compensation was not the result of employers' or workers' to secure benefits at the expense of the other group.  Nor was the success of compensation legislation simply the outcome of Progressive Era social reformers' demands for protective legislation.  Workers' compensation was enacted rapidly across the United States in the 1910s because the key economic interest groups with a stake in the legislation -- employers, workers, and insurance companies -- anticipated benefits from resolving an apparent first decade of the twentieth century, workplace accident risk rose, state legislatures adopted a series of employers' liability laws, and court decisions limited employers' defenses in liability suits, which all combined to substantially increase the uncertainty of the negligence liability system.
ER  -