Using Job Changes to Evaluate the Bias of the Value of a Statistical Life

Hannes Spengler () and Sandra Schaffner

No 713, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

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.

Keywords: Value of a statistical life (VSL); compensating wage differentials; work accidents; job changes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J17 J28 K0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 p.
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-law
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Working Paper: Using Job Changes to Evaluate the Bias of the Value of a Statistical Life (2007)
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