The Reduction for Decedent Self-Consumption: Jurisdictional Mandates for Personal Consumption or Personal Maintenance

David Schap

No 1617, Working Papers from College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics

Abstract: In a wrongful death or survival action, economic damages in most state jurisdictions are assessed recognizing that some portion of the future earnings of the decedent absent the death event would have been consumed by the decedent in the act of living. Where account is taken of this aspect, there is a reduction for what is termed herein as the decedent�s self-consumption. In the vast majority of U.S. legal jurisdictions, the reduction is accomplished according to a norm of personal consumption, which measures the amount a decedent could be expected to have actually consumed in the future absent the death event and after netting out any joint consumption (i.e., any amounts that would have been consumed by the decedent and one or more household members simultaneously, like household heat). There are, however, five states that apply at least in part an alternative norm of personal maintenance, which measures the amount minimally necessary for the decedent in the absence of the death event to have consumed to maintain existence and well being needed to continue to function as an earner. This article presents the results of a 2015 survey of U.S. state-level legal jurisdictions concerning the particular treatment of the reduction for decedent self-consumption, including references to applicable law.

JEL-codes: K13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2016-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Legal Economics, Volume 22, Number 2, April 2016, Pages 107-142

Downloads: (external link)
http://jle.aaefe.org/jle-volume22/vol22-issue2/the ... nal-maintenance.html (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to jle.aaefe.org:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

Related works:
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:hcx:wpaper:1617

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Victor Matheson ().