(1) Background: Although the number of people infected with COVID-19 has increased over time, its effects on workplace accidents are still poorly understood. On the one hand, COVID-19 can reduce workplace accidents through contracted economic activities or changes in work methods. On the other hand, it can increase workplace accidents by spreading in the workplace. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how COVID-19 affected workplace accidents in Korea during the early part of the pandemic. (2) Methods: This paper utilizes the administrative data on workplace accidents in Korea collected by Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency. In particular, we use monthly data from February 2016 to August 2020. This period was chosen to rule out the effect from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in 2015 and to include COVID-19 effects in 2020, given the available data. To examine the impact of COVID-19 on workplace injury and illness, we estimate fixed effects regression models, allowing us to control for group and time effects. (3) Results: COVID-19 was generally found to reduce workplace accidents in Korea, particularly through a reduction in occupational diseases. However, we also found that COVID-19 increased occupational injuries for males and workers in the transportation industry. We provide some evidence that these workers experienced an increase in workload and were unable to change work methods including working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. (4) Conclusions: Our results indicate that to reduce workplace accidents, government interventions should be directed at workers who are unable to change work methods and who are likely to suffer an increase in work burden due to COVID-19.

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The existence of state dependence derived from panel data has played a very important role in studying employment and labor policies. This study is about state dependence of the transportation sector using retrospective panel survey data. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport of Korea has conducted the survey to monitor changes in vehicle ownership and usage nationwide and to prepare measures when oil prices tend to rise sharply. From this data, we identify the existence of state dependence on passenger cars, public transportation, and nonmotorized modes. To do this, we estimate and analyze the dynamic random effects probit model that explains the selection of each transportation mode after controlling for the unobserved individual heterogeneity.Our results indicate that despite the rise of oil prices, behavior of habitual use (i.e., state dependence) of transportation modes is found in all three modes. The amount of state dependence of nonmotorized modes was the largest, followed by passenger cars and public transportation. From the estimated models, important policy implications can be drawn from the fact that the presence of state dependence and the importance of early habit formation are important not only in nonmotorized modes but also in public transportation. In other words, if policy makers want to encourage people to use public transportation in a new city, it suggests that a sufficient and convenient public transportation network should be built before people move to the city. Once cities are built without sufficient public transportation networks and people have become accustomed to using private cars, then it will be more difficult to change their transportation modes, requiring much more social efforts and costs.

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