Adam Smith's idea that wage differences reveal preferences for risk rests on strong theoretical foundations. This paper argues, however, that the dominant approach to identify compensating wage differentials--regressing individual wages on aggregate measures of risk--may lead to arbitrary estimates of these risk differentials. In a dataset with information on both, the incidence of illnesses or injuries across firms and industries, I calculate an implicit value of one injury or illness of about (1990) USD 18,800 pursuing the dominant approach. In contrast, regressing wages on the incidence of risk across firms produces a value of one injury or illness of about USD 11,300. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
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