Risk guideposts for a safer society: Introduction and overview

Abstract

This symposium issue of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty addresses wide-ranging policy issues pertaining to risk regulation and the economic underpinnings of these efforts. One such intervention consists of policies to address informational market failures. Whether new information has a positive value is less obvious than economists often assume. When more stringent regulations are required, the structure and evaluation of these efforts often hinges on the value of a statistical life, or the VSL. This symposium reports estimates of the utility functions that generate these local risk-money tradeoffs as well as new estimates of the VSL using both stated-preference and revealed-preference approaches. Articles also explore the behavioral factors that affect VSL estimates, the effect of health risks on product prices, and how income taxation affects stated-preference survey elicitations of the VSL. The symposium reports estimates of the VSL for almost 200 countries as well as the VSL levels used by U.S. government agencies in analyses of over 100 government regulations from 1985 to 2018.