This paper examines factors that may influence the estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life obtained from contingent valuation surveys that elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) for mortality risk reductions. We examine the importance of distributional assumptions, the choice of the welfare...

Ground level ozone remains a serious problem in the United States. Because ozone non-attainment is a summer problem, episodic rather than continuous controls of ozone precursors are possible. We evaluate the costs and effectiveness of an episodic scheme that requires people to buy permits in...

We report on the results of a survey based on conjoint choice experiments that was specifically designed to investigate the effect of context on the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL), an important input into the calculation of the mortality benefits of environmental policies that reduce...

Guerriero and Cairns (2009) recently estimate that contaminated sites and improper waste management result in 848 excess deaths per year in the provinces of Naples and Caserta in Southern Italy, 403 of which are fatal cancers. In the absence of estimates of the Value of a Prevented Fatality...

What is the value of hazardous weather warnings? To answer this question, we focus on the avalanche bulletin for Switzerland issued by the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF). We take a survey-based, non-market valuation approach to estimating the value of hypothetical...

We study residential demand for electricity and gas, working with nationwide household-level data that cover recent years, namely 1997-2007. Our dataset is a mixed panel/multi-year cross-sections of dwellings/households in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States as of 2008. To our...

Policy has increasingly shifted towards economic incentives and liability attenuation for promoting cleanup and redevelopment of contaminated sites, but little is known about the effectiveness of such policies. An example of such legislation is State Voluntary Cleanup Programs (VCPs), which were...

What is the rate at which people discount future lives saved? The answer to this question has important implications when comparing policies on the grounds of cost per life saved, especially in the context of hazardous waste site remediation, where risk reductions may occur at different times,...