Cost Utility Analysis (CUA) and Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) are methods to evaluate allocations of health care resources. Problems are raised for both methods when income taxes do not meet the first best optimum. This paper explores the implications of three ways that taxes may fall short of...

In evaluating whether a proposed regulation will have net benefits, economists often conduct a cost-benefit analysis. For regulations that are likely to impact human life and safety, that can involve putting a dollar value on human lives that may be saved or lost. A common way to do this is...

It is politicians who have to decide when to release the lockdown, and in what way. In doing so, they have to balance many considerations (as with any decision). Often the different considerations appear incommensurable so that only the roughest of judgements can be made. For example, in the...

Without any intervention, the novel coronavirus would cost the U.S. economy over $9 trillion. A suppression policy aims to reduce the number of new cases through strict social distancing measures by closing schools and non-essential businesses. Less restrictive, a mitigation policy aims to...

Objective: The objective of this article is to examine how people value two different attributes of Value of Life Year (VOLY): life expectancy and the quality of life. The results of the first VOLY estimations conducted in Poland are discussed and compared with Polish cost-effectiveness...

Economic evaluation of projects involving changes in mortality risk conventionally assumes that lives are statistical, i.e., that risks and policy-induced changes in risk are small and similar among a population. In reality, baseline mortality risks and policy-induced changes in risk often...

Household water insecurity harms quality of life outcomes beyond health, for example the disutility of worrying about water availability or anger at disrupted plans. However, these outcomes are excluded from cost-benefit analyses of water supply interventions, which typically measure and value...

This paper argues for an alternative methodology to estimate the value of risk to life. By relaxing the assumption of additive separability, we introduce risk aversion with respect to the length of life and show that the extended model better fits available data. This is crucial for the...