Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards do not permit complicity in modern slavery, human trafficking, or child labor (Principles for Responsible Investment [PRI] 2021, 4). And yet, the breadth and depth of oppressive labor practices in US and global corporate supply chains is, in...

A substantial literature over the past thirty years has evaluated tradeoffs between money and fatality risks. These values in turn serve as estimates of the value of a statistical life. This article reviews more than 60 studies of mortality risk premiums from ten countries and approximately 40...

No one can deny the terrible toll that a nuclear bomb has on humans and our environment. But what about the impacts of weapons containing depleted uranium (DU), a low-level radioactive waste product? A number of countries, including the United States, have used DU munitions during times of war....

To analyze the opioid epidemic, we construct a model where individuals, with and without pain, choose whether to misuse opioids knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of opioid use. Markov chains are estimated from the US data for the college and non–college...

Countries throughout the world use estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) to monetize fatality risks in benefit-cost analyses. However, the vast majority of countries lack reliable revealed preference or stated preference estimates of the VSL. This article proposes that the best way...

Examination of estimates of the income elasticity of the value of a statistical life based on international stated preference studies yields an average between 0.94 and 1.05 overall and 0.65 and 0.80 after controlling for covariates. Quantile regression estimates indicate that the income...

The COVID-19 pandemic poses novel health issues. However, the benefits and costs of the pandemic and policies to address it have a familiar economic structure. Chief among the health-related benefits are the monetized values of the U.S. mortality costs of $3.9 trillion in 2020. The combined U.S....

Ethnic and international conflicts have turned into a real headache for the modern world. The confrontations that have begun between the nations have escalated into serious conflicts that take the lives of thousands of innocent children, women and old people every year. Such conflicts create...

We consider 1927 borrowers from 54 countries who had a credit rating by both Moody's and S&P at the end of 1998, and their subsequent default history up to the end of 2002. Viewing bond ratings as predicted probabilities of default, we consider partial orderings among competing probability...