Note on BLS data

For anyone interested in the data used in "Financing Constraints and Workplace Safety" and "Private equity buyouts and workplace safety," please pay close attention to the data description in the paper before contacting me about obtaining the data.

The data is obtained through a program at the BLS for accessing confidential data. In order to use the data you must apply to the program through the BLS. You can find instructions for doing so here: https://www.bls.gov/rda/home.htm. Please note that the data in our paper is NOT the same as the ODI data which has been made available through the Department of Labor. This data is a much smaller subsample of workplace safety data which has been made available for a selected period of time by OSHA, and does not represent a full overlap with the full sample data gathered by BLS, and does not have identifiers for EIN tax ids. This data has been used in existing papers such as this one, but not ours. If you are interested in further details about this publicly available data you may contact the authors there, but historically I have done very little work with this data.

I am actually working on a small project to more formally organize this ODI data for researchers and potentially provide more robust Compustat linkages, but this project is somewhat on the back burner as of now. If you are interested in working on this organizational project, I'm happy to hear from you, but please be aware that the current state of the project involves a giant pile of incomplete Python code that is still quite far from being a turnkey solution for researchers interested in quickly plugging the data into some research question..

Please do not contact me to request the SOII data in our sample or the EIN identifiers, because I don't physically posses them them and I'm not legally permitted give it out in any case. If after obtaining the rights to use the data through the BLS rda program (https://www.bls.gov/rda/home.htm), you have questions about the data and our research please feel free to contact me. If you write an approved proposal, I am happy provide you with the full complement of Stata programs and share general information about the data and details about potential quirks and pitfalls. I can also direct you to the Compustat linking file for the private equity buyout data, which should be made available at the BLS. However, again, please do not contact me asking for the data or link files directly because I do not have access to them outside the BLS.