My paper with Walter Ryley and Michael Belzer, Intrastate Truck Driver Pay and Safety: A Longitudinal Analysis, is now out in Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society.
The core finding is that drivers who are paid more tend to have fewer crashes. What we add is the first large-scale longitudinal analysis of pay and safety in intrastate trucking, building on the cross-sectional analysis in Ju & Belzer 2024 and Ryley & Belzer 2024. Using a two-way fixed effects model, we show that the pay and safety relationship previously demonstrated using cross-sectional comparisons also holds true within the same carrier over time.
Our longitudinal analysis also allows us to examine this relationship over multiple business cycles. What we find is that the pay and safety relationship is attenuated when state-level unemployment increases and when there are increased cost pressures in the industry. Figure 4 from the paper illustrates just how this relationship changes over time and across labor market conditions.
Figure 4. Median earnings relationship to crashes over time and unemployment rates. Source: Conner, Ryley, and Belzer (2026). Industrial Relations.
These results underscore and add nuance to a long line of papers examining safety in the trucking industry. This further highlights the importance of upstream economic factors in determining workplace, and in the case of trucking, public safety. We point to recent economic regulation of trucking in other countries as potentially informative for U.S. policy.
I am thankful to both of my coauthors, whose deep industry knowledge made this paper far better than it otherwise would have been if I were left to my own devices.