| The United States has long been concerned with coal mine safety regulation. Indeed, given its origins in the progressive reform era of the early 1900s, one might argue that efforts in this arena were forerunners of today's "new style" social regulation. How effective have these efforts been? Trend data indicate that the number and rates of miner injuries and fatalities have declined significantly during the 20th century. Yet controversy still exists over the relative impact of government's efforts in producing these trends.;This study attempts to assess the independent, relative, and conjoint effects of four types of variables on coal mine safety: administrative (mine inspections, mine investigations, and mine safety grants), political (state party competition, gubernatorial party affiliation, and deregulation), economic (state per capita income and unemployment rates), task-related (mine size, technology, and type of mining), and state dummy variables. Trend, Pearson correlation, and pooled time series analyses are performed on fatal and nonfatal injury rates reported in twenty-five coal producing states during the 1975-1985 time period. These are then interpreted in light of three competing theories of regulation: capture, nonmarket failure, and threshold.;Analysis reveals: (1) distinctions in the total explanatory power of the model across different types of injuries, as well as across presidential administrations; (2) a consistently more powerful impact on safety of informational implementation tools (safety education grants) over command-and-control approaches (inspections and investigations) or political variables; and (3) limited albeit conjectural support for a threshold theory of regulation in the coal mine safety arena. |
