Beyond the cited plant: Safety spillovers across multi-plant firms

Introduction: Workplace-safety enforcement is usually evaluated at the inspected establishment. This paper asks whether that plant-level lens misses organizational spillovers in multi-plant firms. Method: We link OSHA Injury Tracking Application records to OSHA enforcement data for meat and poultry processing establishments (NAICS 3116) from 2016 to 2024, yielding 3,839 plant-years for 1,300 plants in 181 multi-plant firms. We examine whether a serious OSHA citation at one plant is followed by lower injury rates at the firm’s other plants. Results: A firm-year fixed-effects design identifies within-firm, cross-plant variation and shows that a serious sibling citation is associated with a 3.43-point lower Total Case Rate in the following year. The estimate is local to 10 mixed-treatment firm-years, so we interpret it cautiously as high-internal-validity evidence of a pattern rather than a population average treatment effect, and directionally consistent full-panel and count models indicate that the association is not confined to that subset. An exploratory comparison finds no clear evidence that the spillover attenuates with geographic distance between plants. Conclusions and practical applications: The findings suggest that OSHA citations may act as safety signals in distributed organizational systems and that enforcement evaluation should consider multi-plant firm networks, not only cited establishments; the evidence is best read as an exploratory step that motivates further causal research.