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...

Our research addresses fundamental long - standing concerns in the compensating wage differentials literature and its public policy implications: the econometric properties of estimates of the value of statistical life (VSL) and the wide range of such estimates from about $0.5 million to about...

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,...

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...

Using a large data set, the authors find that smokers select riskier jobs, but receive lower total wage compensation for risk than do nonsmokers. This finding is inconsistent with conventional models of compensating differentials. The authors develop a model in which worker risk preferences and...

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...

This paper accounts for the value of children and future generations in the evaluation of health policies. This is achieved through the incorporation of altruism and fertility in a "value of life" type of framework. We are able to express adults' willingness to pay for changes in child mortality...

Per the National Academy of Sciences’ 2017 recommendations, the social cost of carbon (SCC) is now calculated with a modular framework in which researchers can easily substitute different models for estimating climate damages. The modular approach is an improvement from previous practice, but...