期刊名称：DIW Diskussionspapiere / Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
出版年度：2007
卷号：2007
出版社：Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
摘要：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.
关键词：Value of a statistical life (VSL), compensating wage differentials, work
accidents, job changes
