Does whistleblowing protection save lives? International evidence from workplace safety outcomes

Whistleblowing protection is typically examined as a governance mechanism for detecting organisational misconduct, financial fraud, and regulatory violations. Its broader ethical function in enabling employee voice and preventing operational harm remains less fully theorised. Drawing on institutional theory, this study conceptualises whistleblowing protection as an ethical infrastructure through which regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutions shape employees’ willingness to raise concerns about organisational risk. We argue that effective whistleblowing protection converts ethical awareness into organisational action by reducing the personal costs of speaking up, strengthening the credibility of internal escalation, and enabling firms to identify and correct unsafe practices before harm materialises. Using a global panel of 18,303 firm-year observations from 60 countries between 2003 and 2023, we examine the association between whistleblowing protection and workplace safety outcomes. The analysis combines firm fixed-effects models with Lewbel instrumental-variable estimation, entropy balancing, coefficient stability tests, and a difference-in-differences design exploiting the regulatory shock of the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act. The results show that stronger whistleblowing protection is associated with significantly lower workplace injury rates, equivalent to an approximately 23% reduction relative to the sample mean. This relationship is strengthened by board-level oversight of ethics and workplace safety and by higher-quality public governance institutions, but weakened in high power distance cultures. By linking whistleblowing protection to employee welfare, this study advances business ethics research by showing that protecting whistleblowers is not merely a compliance mechanism, but a core element of moral governance grounded in stakeholder care, employee dignity, and the prevention of foreseeable harm.