The Value of a Statistical Life is a key input into the calculation of the benefits of environmental policies that save lives. To date, the VSL used in environmental policy analyses has not been adjusted for age or the cause of death. Air pollution regulations, however, are linked to reductions...

Guerriero and Cairns (2009) recently estimate that contaminated sites and improper waste management result in 848 excess deaths per year in the provinces of Naples and Caserta in Southern Italy, 403 of which are fatal cancers. In the absence of estimates of the Value of a Prevented Fatality...

In 1987 the federal government permitted states to raise the speed limit on their rural interstate roads, but not on their urban interstate roads, from 55 mph to 65 mph for the first time in over a decade. Since the states that adopted the higher speed limit must have valued the travel hours...

We provide a framework to disentangle the role of preferences and beliefs in health behavior, and we apply it to compliance behavior during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using rich data on subjective expectations collected during the spring 2020 lockdown in the UK, we estimate a...

Do quality at entry assessments enhance the delivery of development projects? In this paper we take advantage of approval and execution systems in place at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to examine whether projects that have higher quality at entry-captured through grading scores...

Using a dynamic model of the control of an infectious disease, we derive the conditions under which eradication will be optimal. When eradication is feasible, the optimal program requires either a low vaccination rate or eradication. A high vaccination rate is never optimal. Under special...

The Stern/Nordhaus controversy has polarized the widely disparate beliefs about what to do in order to tackle the climate challenge. To explain differences in results and policy recommendations, comments following the publication of the Stern Review have mainly focused on the role played by the...