Cost-benefit analyses are commonly applied to assess the net welfare effects of policies to improve surface water quality. These analyses often disregard the biophysical fact that from implementation of policy measures to resulting improvements on water quality there will typically be...

Federal health and safety regulations have saved or improved the lives of thousands of Americans, but protecting our citizens from risk entails significant costs. In a world of limited resources, we must spend our regulatory dollars responsibly in order to do the most we can with the money we...

In the estimation of the benefits of mortality reduction, a simple approach is to multiply the value of a statistical life (VSL) by the expected reduction in fatalities, thus holding the VSL constant. This procedure approximates benefits for small changes in mortality, but inaccurately...

Selfish utilitarianism, neo-classical economics, the directive of short-term income maximization, and the decision tool of cost-benefit analysis fail to protect our species from the significant risks of too much consumption, pollution, or population. For a longer-term survival, humanity needs to...

Using decision analysis, we estimated the benefits, risks and costs of routine childhood immunization against pertussis. Without an immunization program, we predict that there would be a 71-fold increase in cases and an almost fourfold increase in deaths (2.0 to 7.6) per cohort of one million...

The Value of a Statistical Life is a key input into the calculation of the benefits of environmental policies that save lives. To date, the VSL used in environmental policy analyses has not been adjusted for age or the cause of death. Air pollution regulations, however, are linked to reductions...