Essays on the Value of Statistical Life PDF Download

Author: Ikuho Kochi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781109958126
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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This dissertation addresses two important issues in the literature estimating the Value of a Statistical Life. The first issue is the potential endogeneity bias in cross-section hedonic wage models. The second issue is the transferability of the VSL between different policy contexts.

Author: Minhaj Mahmud
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Longevity
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Author: W. Kip Viscusi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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A substantial literature over the past thirty years has evaluated tradeoffs between money and fatality risks. These values in turn serve as estimates of the value of a statistical life. This article reviews more than 60 studies of mortality risk premiums from ten countries and approximately 40 studies that present estimates of injury risk premiums. This critical review examines a variety of econometric issues, the role of unionization in risk premiums, and the effects of age on the value of a statistical life. Our meta-analysis indicates an income elasticity of the value of a statistical life from about 0.5 to 0.6. The paper also presents a detailed discussion of policy applications of these value of a statistical life estimates and related issues, including risk-risk analysis.

Author: H. Spencer Banzhaf
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Value of Statistical Life (VSL) is arguably the most important number in benefit-cost analyses of environmental, health, and transportation policies. However, agencies have used a wide range of VSL values. One reason may be the embarrassment of riches when it comes to VSL studies. While meta-analysis is a standard way to synthesize information across studies, we now have multiple competing meta-analyses and reviews. Thus, to analysts, picking one such meta-analysis may feel as hard as picking a single "best study." This paper responds by taking the meta-analysis another step, estimating a meta-analysis (or mixture distribution) of six meta-analyses. The baseline model yields a central VSL of $7.0m, with a 90% confidence interval of $2.4m to $11.2m. The provided code allows users to easily change subjective weights on the studies, add new studies, or change adjustments for income, inflation, and latency.

Author: Henry Wyldbore Rumsey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781436837729
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Author: Brandon Posner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : College students
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description
The Value of Statistical Life (VSL) is used in policy analysis to calculate the benefit of risk-reducing policy initiatives. College students are currently overlooked in the literature, for no college student-specific VSL estimate exists. In this study, I discuss why VSL estimates for the general population cannot be applied to college students. I also derive a college student-specific VSL using a willingness-to-pay survey. I found that payment vehicle has a large impact on students' willingness-to-pay for risk reduction, and college student VSLs are substantially lower than those of the general population.

Author: Krishna R Dronamraju
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814489581
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
The biological wealth of our planet is represented by the biodiversity that surrounds us. Our future wellbeing depends on the care and conservation that we practice to protect and enhance that biodiversity, which resides mostly in developing countries. Yet, the holders of traditional knowledge remain poor, while those exploiting it commercially become prosperous. As we utilize recombinant DNA technology to achieve food security and other goals, serious apprehension has arisen in the public mind with regard to the impact of genetically modified crops on our environment and health. Similarly, the long-term impact of gene therapy is not known either. These dilemmas and their ethical implications are examined in this book in the context of intellectual property rights and international cooperation.

Author: Henry Wyldbore Rumsey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Author: Gianmarco Leon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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The three essays conforming this thesis are representative pieces of my approach to analyzing the causes and consequences of economic underdevelopment. The overaching topic that ties together these essays is role that institutions and culture play in affecting specific behaviors that undermine development. The approach to the questions addressed in each essay is empirical, using data from Per\'{u} and Sierra Leone, and relies on economic theory to provide a general framework and deepen our understanding of the observed behaviors. Below, I provide a more detailed summary of the main findings of each chapter in this thesis: In Chapter 1, ''Turnout, Political Preferences, and Information: Evidence from Perú'', I explore the role of electoral institutions that encourage citizens to vote on voter behavior. These institutions are widely used around the world, and yet little is known about the effects of such institutions on voter participation and the composition of the electorate. In this paper, I combine a field experiment with a change in Peruvian voting laws to identify the effect of fines for abstention on voting. Using the random variation in the fine for abstention and an objective measure of turnout at the individual level, I estimate the elasticity of voting with respect to cost to be -0.21. Consistent with the theoretical model presented in this essay, the reduction in turnout is driven by voters who (i) are in the center of the political spectrum, (ii) are less interested in politics, and (iii) hold less political information. However, voters who respond to changes in the cost of abstention do not have different preferences for policies than those who vote regardless of the cost. Further, involvement in politics, as measured by the decision to acquire political information, seems to be independent of the level of the fine. Additional results indicate that the reduction in the fine reduces the incidence of vote buying and increases the price paid for a vote. Chapter 2, ''Civil Conflict and Human Capital Accumulation: The Long Term Consequences of Political Violence in Perú'', analyzes the consequences of a long lasting civil conflict on human capital accumulation. In this chapter, I provide empirical evidence of the long- and short-term effects of exposure to political violence on human capital accumulation. Using a novel data set that registers all the violent acts and fatalities during the Peruvian civil conflict, I exploit the variation in conflict location and birth cohorts to identify the effect of the civil war on educational attainment. Conditional on being exposed to violence, the average person accumulates 0.31 less years of education as an adult. In the short-term, the effects are stronger than in the long run; these results hold when comparing children within the same household. Further, children are able to catch up if they experience violence once they have already started their schooling cycle, while if they are affected earlier in life the effect persists in the long run. I explore the potential causal mechanisms, finding that supply shocks delay entrance to school but don't cause lower educational achievement in the long-run. On the demand side, suggestive evidence shows that the effect on mother's health status and the subsequent effect on child health is what drives the long-run results. In the third and final chapter of this dissertation, "Transportation Choices, Fatalism, and the Value of Statistical Life in Africa", joint work with Edward Miguel, we take a look at the role culture plays in determining the willigness to pay to avoid life thretening situations. Specifically, we exploit a unique transportation setting to estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL) in Africa. We observe choices made by travelers to and from the airport in Freetown, Sierra Leone (which is separated from the city by a body of water) among transport options -namely, ferry, helicopter, speed boat, and hovercraft - each with differential historical mortality risk and monetary and time costs, and estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make using a discrete choice model. These revealed preference VSL estimates also exploit exogenous variation in travel risk generated by daily weather shocks, e.g. rainfall. We find that African travelers have very low willingness to pay for marginal reductions in mortality risk, with an estimated average VSL close to zero. Our sample of African airport travelers report high incomes (close to average U.S. levels), and likely have relatively long remaining life expectancy, ruling out the two most obvious explanations for the low value of life. Alternative explanations, such as those based on cultural factors, including the well-documented fatalism found in many West African societies, appear more promising.

Author: Joseph E. Aldy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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This paper develops a life-cycle model in which workers choose both consumption levels and job fatality risks, implying that the effect of age on the value of life is ambiguous. The empirical analysis of this relationship uses novel, age-dependent fatal and nonfatal risk variables. Workers' value of statistical life exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship over workers' life cycle based on hedonic wage model estimates, age-specific hedonic wage estimates, and a minimum distance estimator. The value of statistical life for a 60-year old ranges from $2.5 million to $3.0 million -- less than half the value for 30 to 40-year olds.