TY - RPRT AU - Jirjahn, Uwe AU - Mohrenweiser, Jens AU - Smith, Stephen C. TI - Works Councils and Workplace Health Promotion in Germany PY - 2019/Jan/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 12113 UR - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp12113 AB - From a theoretical viewpoint, there can be market failures resulting in an underprovision of occupational health and safety. Works councils may help mitigate these failures. Using establishment data from Germany, our empirical analysis confirms that the incidence of a works council is significantly associated with an increased likelihood that the establishment provides more workplace health promotion than required by law. This result also holds in a recursive bivariate probit regression accounting for the possible endogeneity of works council incidence. Furthermore, analyzing potentially moderating factors such as collective bargaining coverage, industry, type of ownership, multi-establishment status and product market competition, we find a positive association between works councils and workplace health promotion for the various types of establishments examined. Finally, we go beyond the mere incidence of workplace health promotion and show that works councils are positively associated with a series of different measures of workplace health promotion. KW - occupational health and safety KW - works council KW - non-union employee representation KW - workplace health promotion ER -