Although the attitude towards death was central to Stoic philosophy, economists studying the value of life paid little attention to Stoicism. The goal of this paper is to build an analytical bridge between Stoicism and the economic study of the value of life. We use writings of Epictetus, Seneca...

We study medical progress within an economy of overlapping generations subject to endogenous mortality. Individuals demand health care with a view to lowering mortality over their life-cycle. We characterise the individual optimum and the general equilibrium of the economy and study the impact...

We estimate the demand value of road safety improvements in Switzerland from survey data using a novel elicitation approach. Individuals’ responses to questions about how much public spending on road safety should be increased are combined with observations of income, tax rate, and road usage...

The present study examines whether the Preston curve reflects a causal impact of income on longevity or, for example, factors correlated with both income and life expectancy. In order to understand the Preston curve better, we develop a model of optimal intertemporal consumption in which the...

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...

Meta-regression estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) controlling for publication selection bias often yield bias-corrected estimates of VSL that are substantially below the mean VSL estimates. Labor market studies using the more recent Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI)...

There are many possible connections between VSL and behavioral economics. A list of topics includes endowment effects, risk salience, ambiguity aversion, present bias, reference groups, reference points, and experienced versus decision utilities. There are also nudges that connect to estimating...

The value of risks to life as measured by the risk-money trade-off plays a fundamental role in economic analyses of health and safety risks and serves as the principal benefit measure for government risk regulation policies. The hedonic models that have been employed to generate empirical...

A prominent theoretical controversy in the compensating differentials literature concerns unobservable individual productivity. Competing models yield opposite predictions depending on whether the unobservable productivity is safety-related skill or productivity generally. Using five panel waves...

The economic approach to valuing risks to life focuses on risk-money tradeoffs for very small risks of death, or the value of statistical life (VSL). These VSL levels will generally exceed the optimal insurance amounts. A substantial literature has estimated the wage-fatality risk tradeoffs,...