Viscusi and Aldy (2003) observe that "most studies of the U.S. labor market find that union affiliation is positively correlated with a greater wage-risk tradeoff while international evidence is much more mixed." They provide several arguments as to why the risk premium might be higher for union...

This paper presents a new approach to obtain unbiased estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) with labor market data. Investigating job changes, we combine the advantages of recent panel studies, which allow to control for unobserved heterogeneity of workers, and conventional...

A prominent theoretical controversy in the compensating differentials literature concerns unobservable individual productivity. Competing models yield opposite predictions depending on whether the unobservable productivity is safety-related skill or productivity generally. Using five panel waves...

The economic approach to valuing risks to life focuses on risk-money tradeoffs for very small risks of death, or the value of statistical life (VSL). These VSL levels will generally exceed the optimal insurance amounts. A substantial literature has estimated the wage-fatality risk tradeoffs,...

Our research clarifies the conceptual linkages among willingness to pay for additional safety, willingness to accept less safety, and the value of statistical life (VSL). We present econometric estimates that in the important case of workers' decisions concerning exposure to fatal injury risk...

Our research clarifies the conceptual linkages among willingness to pay for additional safety, willingness to accept less safety, and the value of a statistical life (VSL). We present econometric estimates using panel data to analyze the VSL levels associated with job changes that may affect the...

This paper is in two parts. The first part is a report written in 1989 for the UK Department for Transport (DTp) to consider the way non fatal accidents should be treated in project evaluations. At the time, the DTp had adopted an economic approach to the costing of fatalities based on the...

The value of risks to life as measured by the risk-money trade-off plays a fundamental role in economic analyses of health and safety risks and serves as the principal benefit measure for government risk regulation policies. The hedonic models that have been employed to generate empirical...

Estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) establish the price government agencies use to value fatality risks. Transferring these valuations to other populations often utilizes the income elasticity of the VSL, which typically draw on estimates from meta-analyses. Using a data set...

We investigate how ethnicity, gender and other characteristics affect low-paid workers' perceptions of their employability in London's labour market, examining self-efficacy, ethnic and dual labour market theories. We find that perceptions vary considerably, both between genders and ethnicities...