IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ler/wpaper/27221.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Welfare Value of FDA’s Mercury-in-Fish Advisory: A Dynamic Reanalysis

Author

Listed:
  • Hammitt, James
  • Rheinberger, Christoph

Abstract

Assessing the welfare impact of consumer health advisories is a thorny task. Recently, Shimshack and Ward (2010) studied how U.S. households responded to FDA’s 2001 mercury-in-fish advisory. They found that the average at-risk household reduced fish consumption by about 24%, resulting in a 21%-reduction in mercury exposure at the cost of a 28%-reduction in cardioprotective omega-3 fatty acids. A rough assessment of the health costs and benefits led Shimshack and Ward to conclude that the advisory policy resulted in an overall consumer welfare loss. In this note, we propose a more comprehensive assessment that links the long term cardiovascular health effects of the advisory policy to life cycle consumption. In addition to mortality risk, our model values the loss in health quality from non-fatal cardiovascular diseases. Using the same dose-response relationships as Shimshack and Ward, we find that the expected health and mortality loss to the average at-risk household is much larger than they suggested. The analysis highlights the importance of accounting for dynamic effects when evaluating persistent changes in exposure to environmental health risks.

Suggested Citation

  • Hammitt, James & Rheinberger, Christoph, 2013. "The Welfare Value of FDA’s Mercury-in-Fish Advisory: A Dynamic Reanalysis," LERNA Working Papers 13.07.394, LERNA, University of Toulouse.
  • Handle: RePEc:ler:wpaper:27221
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www2.toulouse.inra.fr/lerna/travaux/cahiers2013/13.07.394.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Food safety; mercury; fatty acids; policy analysis; excess lifetime risk;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • J17 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Value of Life; Foregone Income
    • P36 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions - - - Consumer Economics; Health; Education and Training; Welfare, Income, Wealth, and Poverty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ler:wpaper:27221. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Maxime MARTY (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lrtlsfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.