Adjusting the Value of a Statistical Life for Age and Cohort Effects

Joseph Aldy and W Viscusi

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008, vol. 90, issue 3, 573-581

Abstract: To resolve the theoretical ambiguity in the effect of age on the value of statistical life (VSL), this article uses a novel, age-dependent fatal risk measure to estimate age-specific hedonic wage regressions. VSL exhibits an inverted-U-shaped relationship with age. In the year 2000 cross section, workers' VSL rises from $3.7 million (ages 18-24) to $9.7 million (35-44), and declines to $3.4 million (55-62). Controlling for birth-year cohort effects in a minimum distance estimator yields a peak VSL of $7.8 million at age 46, and flattens the age-VSL relationship. The value of statistical life-year also follows an inverted-U shape with age. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (138)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.90.3.573 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Adjusting the Value of a Statistical Life for Age and Cohort Effects (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:90:y:2008:i:3:p:573-581

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().