The Value of a Statistical Life

Viscusi, W. K., & Aldy, J. E. (2003). The Value of a Statistical Life: A Critical Review of Market Estimates Throughout the World. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 27(1), 5-76.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2003

Volume

27

Issue

1

Pages

5-76

DOI

10.1023/a:1025598106257

DOI registrant

Springer Nature

Link

https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025598106257

Cited from

behavioral_economics, economics_finance

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Primes

• Cost–Benefit Analysis
  • The value-of-statistical-life (VSL) methodology

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The abstract backs the VSL methodology as a review of 60+ mortality-risk-premium studies, but carries neither the $10-11M figure nor the controversy.

    “A substantial literature over the past thirty years has evaluated tradeoffs between money and fatality risks. These values in turn serve as estimates of the value of a statistical life. This article reviews more than 60 studies of mortality risk premiums from ten countries”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Value Commensuration
  • … a health economist assigns a monetary value to a statistical life (often ~$9 million in US policy, as derived from the meta-analysis of labor-market wage-risk tradeoffs in Viscusi and Aldy (2003)), she is not measuring a pre-existing quantity; she is imposing a commensuration to enable comparison and decision-making.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The abstract confirms a meta-analysis of labor-market wage-risk mortality studies that yields value-of-a-statistical-life estimates for policy use, but states no dollar figure and no claim that the value is imposed rather than measured.

    “A substantial literature over the past thirty years has evaluated tradeoffs between money and fatality risks. These values in turn serve as estimates of the value of a statistical life. This article reviews more than 60 studies of mortality risk premiums from ten countries and approximately 40 studies that present estimates of injury risk premiums.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 2 of 2 citations: 2 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:72e10aa42246 · see in the full table