Economic research has developed estimates of the heterogeneity of the value of statistical life (VSL) on dimensions such as individual age, income, immigrant status, and the nature of the risk exposure. This paper examines the empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of VSL and explores the...

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighted the glaring weakness in the current liability and regulatory regime for oil spills and for environmental catastrophes more broadly. This article proposes a new liability structure for deep sea oil drilling and for catastrophic risks generally. It...

Catastrophic risks differ in terms of their natural or human origins, their possible amplification by human behaviors, and the relationships between those who create the risks and those who suffer the losses. Given their disparate anatomies, catastrophic risks generally require tailored...

The most enduring measure of how individuals make personal decisions affecting their health and safety is the compensating wage differential for job safety risk revealed in the labor market via hedonic equilibrium outcomes. The decisions in turn reveal the value of a statistical life (VSL), the...

Voters' preferences for smoking restrictions in restaurants, bars, malls, indoor sporting events, and hospitals are consistent with state-level restrictions on smoking in each of these public areas. This analysis is based on constructed measures of political pressure that take into account both...

This paper is a response to the comments by David Luban and Theodore Eisenberg on my article on punitive damages to be published in the Georgetown Law Journal (1998) and entitled "The Social Costs of Punitive Damages against Corporations in Environmental and Safety Tort." Neither of these...

This article assesses the relative effects on household recycling across characteristics of individuals and their households, their counties, and the states in which they live. We use a representative United States sample of over 380,000 household observations to explore which factors promote or...

Intentional violence against healthcare workers inflicts a physical and mental toll, motivating legislative proposals to better regulate these occupational risks. This article uses this context to address two novel issues for benefit assessment raised by injuries from assailants: potential...

In the span of ten days, the United States experienced two of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. The first mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York killed ten people and injured three more—mostly elderly shoppers. The second mass shooting at an elementary school in...

Many regulatory agencies have authority to promptly protect against grave dangers—so long as the danger is not too grave, according to recent Supreme Court jurisprudence. Agencies are often delegated emergency authority to address risks rapidly, though temporarily, to protect the public from...