|
EconStor >
Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW), Berlin >
DIW-Diskussionspapiere >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/10419/27237
|
| | |
| Title: | | Using job changes to evaluate the bias of the value of a statistical life  |
| Authors: | | Spengler, Hannes Schaffner, Sandra |
| Issue Date: | | 2007 |
| Series/Report no.: | | Discussion papers // German Institute for Economic Research 713 |
| 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. |
| Subjects: | | Value of a statistical life (VSL) compensating wage differentials work accidents job changes |
| JEL: | | I10 J17 J28 K00 |
| Document Type: | | Working Paper |
| Appears in Collections: | | Publikationen von Forscherinnen und Forschern des DIW DIW-Diskussionspapiere
|
| |
| | |
Download bibliographical data as:
BibTeX
|
| |
Share on:http://hdl.handle.net/10419/27237
|
Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
|