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The Value of a Statistical Life and the Coefficient of Relative Risk Aversion

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Louis Kaplow

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Abstract

Individuals' risk preferences are estimated and employed in a variety of settings, notably including choices in financial, labor, and product markets. Recent work, especially in financial economics, provides estimates of individuals' coefficients of relative risk aversion (CRRA's) in excess of one, and often significantly higher. However, it can be shown that high CRRA's imply equally high values for the income elasticity of the value of a statistical life. Yet estimates of this elasticity, derived from labor and product markets, are in the range of 0.5 to 0.6. Furthermore, it turns out that even a CRRA below one is difficult to reconcile with these elasticity estimates. Thus, there appears to be an important (additional) anomaly involving individuals' risk-taking behavior in different market settings.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 9852.

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Date of creation: Jul 2003
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9852

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D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions

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  21. Louis Kaplow, 2003. "The Value of a Statistical Life and the Coefficient of Relative Risk Aversion," NBER Working Papers 9852, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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(explanations, 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.)

  1. Oliver Fabel & Thomas Weber, 2005. "Entrepreneurial Elites: Industry Structure and Welfare Effects of Incubating New Businesses," Working Papers of the Research Group Heterogenous Labor 05-09, Research Group Heterogeneous Labor, University of Konstanz/ZEW Mannheim. [Downloadable!]
  2. Peter P. Wakker, 2008. "Explaining the characteristics of the power (CRRA) utility family," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 17(12), pages 1329-1344. [Downloadable!]
  3. Mary F. Evans & V. Kerry Smith, 2009. "Measuring How Risk Tradeoffs Adjust With Income," NBER Working Papers 15372, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Paul Allanson, 2008. "On the characterisation and measurement of the welfare effects of income mobility from an ex-ante perspective," Discussion Papers 219, University of Dundee, Economic Studies. [Downloadable!]
  5. Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Klara Sabirianova Peter, 2006. "Public Sector Pay and Corruption: Measuring Bribery from Micro Data," IZA Discussion Papers 1987, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
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  6. Louis Kaplow, 2005. "The Value of a Statistical Life and the Coefficient of Relative Risk Aversion," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 23-34, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  7. Mary F. Evans & V. Kerry Smith, 2008. "Complementarity and the Measurement of Individual Risk Tradeoffs: Accounting for Quantity and Quality of Life Effects," NBER Working Papers 13722, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  8. Louis Kaplow, 2003. "Concavity of Utility, Concavity of Welfare, and Redistribution of Income," NBER Working Papers 10005, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. Raj Chetty, 2006. "A Bound on Risk Aversion Using Labor Supply Elasticities," NBER Working Papers 12067, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  10. Laszlo Goerke, 2007. "Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts and Collective Wage Determination," IZA Discussion Papers 3141, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
  11. Robert E. Hall & Charles I. Jones, 2005. "The value of life and the rise in health spending," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
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