Randomized government safety inspections reduce worker injuries with no detectable job loss.

Controversy surrounds occupational health and safety regulators, with some observers claiming that workplace regulations damage firms' competitiveness and destroy jobs and others arguing that they make workplaces safer at little cost to employers and employees. We analyzed a natural field experiment to examine how workplace safety inspections affected injury rates and other outcomes. We compared 409 randomly inspected establishments in California with 409 matched-control establishments that were eligible, but not chosen, for inspection.

Framing the elusive concept of sustainability: a sustainability hierarchy.

Usage of the word "sustainability" is widespread and incorporates a plethora of meanings. After reviewing four extant sustainability frameworks, we propose a Sustainability Hierarchy to structure a broad array of issues that have been associated with sustainability. These issues vary widely in their urgency, severity and uncertainty of consequences, and temporal and spatial dimensions.

Environmental implications of wireless technologies: news delivery and business meetings.

Wireless information technologies are providing new ways to communicate, and are one of several information and communication technologies touted as an opportunity to reduce society's overall environmental impacts. However, rigorous system-wide environmental impact comparisons of these technologies to the traditional applications they may replace have only recently been initiated, and the results have been mixed. In this paper, the environmental effects of two applications of wireless technologies are compared to those of conventional technologies for which they can substitute.

Estimating and controlling workplace risk: an approach for occupational hygiene and safety professionals.

The protection of people and physical assets is the objective of health and safety professionals and is accomplished through the paradigm of anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of risks in the occupational environment. Risk assessment concepts are not only used by health and safety professionals, but also by business and financial planners. Since meeting health and safety objectives requires financial resources provided by business and governmental managers, the hypothesis addressed here is that health and safety risk decisions should be made with probabilistic processes used in financial decision-making and which are familiar and recognizable to business and government planners and managers.