Winslott Hiselius, Lena () (Department of Economics, Lund University)
Abstract
The level of safety investments can be argued to vary between sectors. The safety investments legally required and carried out within the railway sector indicate that there is a higher implicit value in preventing a fatality within the rail sector than within the road sector. The literature overview discusses factors possibly influencing individuals’ perception of risk and their willingness to trade risk for money. The study seeks to combine results, from e.g. the field of psychological studies, with work performed by economists in order to analyse whether the value of preventing a statistical life used in the road traffic sector can be argued to differ from the value used in the railway sector. The research discussed here indicates that the use of different values may be theoretically motivated. However, empirical findings presented do not confirm that the value of a statistical life used in the railway sector is many times larger than that used in the road sector. Research indicates, furthermore, that the variation of perceived risk within the context of one traffic mode may be as large as, or even larger than, the variation between different traffic contexts. The result implies that studies estimating the value of a statistical life should focus not only on disparities between transport modes per se but also on disparities between accident types.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Lund University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
2003:13.
Length: 44 pages Date of creation: 03 Oct 2003 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2003_013
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Box 7082, S-220 07 Lund,Sweden Phone: +46 +46 222 0000 Fax: +46 +46 2224613 Web page: http://www.nek.lu.se/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (David Edgerton).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: