When Policy Meets Weather: Extreme Temperatures and Workplace Safety

• Authors: Cristina Bellés Obrero, Giulia Montresor and Catia Nicodemo
• BSE Working Paper: 1519 | October 2025
• Keywords: climate change, temperature, work place accidents, adaptation policy
• JEL codes: I1, J28, J81, Q54

This paper estimates the causal effects of extreme temperatures on workplace accidents in Spain and evaluates whether public policy can mitigate them. Linking the universe of administrative records on occupational injuries to high-resolution weather data, we find that both cold and heat significantly increase workplace accidents, but with strikingly different patterns. Relative to days with temperatures between 10 and 15◦C, ice days (below 0◦C) increase workplace accidents by 16%, while hot days (35–40◦C) raise them by 5.5%. Cold disproportionately affects women, older workers, native workers, permanent employees, and commuting accidents, whereas heat poses greater risks for men, temporary workers, immigrants, blue-collar workers, outdoor workers, fatal accidents, and injuries explicitly linked to thermal exposure. We find no evidence of endogenous adaptation over the sample period. To assess whether policy can fill this gap, we exploit a 2015 reform of Spain’s national heat alert system that lowered province- specific activation thresholds by incorporating epidemiological mortality data. Difference-in- differences and event-study estimates show that the reform reduced workplace accidents on high-temperature days by 7.6%, with particularly large effects for temporary workers (11.1%) and for injuries explicitly linked to extreme temperatures (19.7%). These findings show that targeted climate-adaptation policies can substantially mitigate occupational risks.