Causal impact evaluation of occupational safety policies on firms’ default using machine learning uplift modelling

It is often undermined that occupational safety policies do not only displace a direct effect on work well-being, but also an indirect effect on firms' economic performances. In such context, econometric models dominated the scenes of causality until recently while Machine Learning models were seen with skepticism. With the rise of complex datasets, an ever-increasing need for automated algorithms capable to handle complex non-linear relationships between variables has brought to uncover the power of Machine Learning for causality. In this paper, we carry out an evaluation of a public aid-scheme implemented in Italy and oriented to support investment of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in occupational safety and health (OSH) for assessing the impact on the survival of corporations. A comparison of thirteen models is performed and the Individual Treatment Effect (ITE) estimated and validated based on the AUUC and Qini score for which best values of 0.064 and 0.407, respectively, are obtained based on the Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM). An additional in-depth statistical analysis also revealed that the best beneficiaries of the policy intervention are those firms that experience performance issues in the period just before the interventions and for which the increased liquidity brought by the policy may have prevented default.