Superbonus raised construction jobs while injury rates fell 7 percent
Italy’s Superbonus raised male construction employment by 12 percent while reducing injury rates by about 7 percent relative to a counterfactual, according to Bank of Italy research published on October 20, 2026.
More workers, lower injury incidence
Andrea Benecchi, Daniele Ruggeri and Elisa Scarinzi estimate that the Superbonus reduced quarterly injuries involving permanent impairment by 0.114 per thousand male workers.
Against a 2018–2019 baseline of 1.7 per thousand, this represents roughly 7 percent and more than 1,700 injuries prevented during 2021–2023.
Absolute injuries nevertheless increased as employment expanded.
Their synthetic difference-in-differences analysis compares construction across 20 regions with 240 control units, using 5,200 observations from 2018–2023, excluding 2020.
Treatment begins in Q1 2021.
Employment and injury effects are statistically distinguishable from zero at the 1 percent and 5 percent levels, respectively.
Commuting accidents and civil engineering are excluded.
Tax credits strengthened safety incentives
Introduced in 2020, the Superbonus raised renovation incentives from 65 to 110 percent; its fiscal scale reached about 3.7 percent of GDP in 2021–2022.
Eligibility required certified safety compliance.
Decree 146/2021 made business suspension mandatory for qualifying safety violations and removed the repeat-offense requirement.
The authors argue that subsidized demand increased the cost of suspension and exclusion.
In the ten regions with greatest uptake, employment rose 15 percent and injury rates fell 8.3 percent; the injury effect elsewhere was not statistically distinguishable from zero.
The mechanism remains unresolved
The authors interpret the results as evidence that safety conditions can counter injury risks during rapid expansion.
Robustness checks retain the decline after controlling for inspections and younger workers.
They caution that the estimates cannot separate compliance incentives from possible safety investment.