What's in a Name? A Systematic Search for Alternatives to "VSL"

Chris Dockins, Kelly Maguire (), Stephen Newbold (), Nathalie Simon, Alan Krupnick and Laura Taylor

No 201801, NCEE Working Paper Series from National Center for Environmental Economics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Abstract: Benefit-cost analyses of environmental, health, and safety regulations often rely on an estimate of the “value of statistical life,” or VSL, to calculate the aggregate benefits of human mortality risk reductions in monetary terms. The VSL represents the marginal rate of substitution between mortality risk and money, and while well-understood by economists, to many non-economists, decision-makers, media professionals, and others, the term resembles obfuscated jargon bordering on the immoral. This paper describes a series of seven focus groups in which we applied a systematic approach for identifying and testing alternatives to the VSL terminology. Our objective was to identify a term that better communicates the VSL concept. Specifically, a list of 17 alternatives to the VSL term was developed and tested in focus groups that culminated in a formal ranking exercise. Using a round-robin tournament approach to analyze the data, and our qualitative judgments, we identify “value of reduced mortality risk” as the dominant replacement term among the alternatives tested.

Keywords: value of statistical life; mortality risk valuation; terminology; focus group (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J17 Q51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2018-01, Revised 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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