@techreport{Spengler2007Using,
abstract = {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 cross-sectional estimations, which primarily exploit the variation of wage and risk between different jobs.We find a VSL of 6.1 million euros from pooled cross-sectional estimation, 1.9 million euros from the static first-differences panel model and 3.5 million euros from the job-changer specification.Thus, ignoring individual heterogeneity causes overestimates of the VSL, whereas identifying the wage-risk tradeoff not only by means of between job variation (job-changer model) but also on the basis of noisy variation on the job (panel models) may lead to underestimates of the VSL. Our results can be used to perform cost-benefit analyses of public projects aimed at reducing fatality risks, e.g., in the domains of health, environmental or traffic policy.},
address = {Essen},
author = {Hannes Spengler and Sandra Schaffner},
copyright = {http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen},
isbn = {978-3-86788-008-4},
keywords = {I10; J17; J28; K00; 330; Value of a statistical life (VSL); compensating wage differentials; work accidents; job changes; Mensch; Bewertung; Wert des Lebens; Bias; Arbeitsmobilit\"{a}t; Theorie},
language = {eng},
number = {14},
publisher = {RWI},
title = {Using job changes to evaluate the bias of the value of a statistical life},
type = {Ruhr economic papers},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10419/26779},
year = {2007}
}
