W Kip Viscusi
Biographic Data
| ID | 374356 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Kip Viscusi |
| GIVEN NAMES | W Kip |
| FAMILY NAME | Viscusi |
| SIGNATURE | VISCUSI W K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7931-7689 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 84 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 177 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 85 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Value of a Statistical Life by Race and Ethnicity
There is substantial heterogeneity in the rate of compensation that workers receive for fatality risks. The wage-risk tradeoff rate given by the value of a statistical life (VSL) is about $14 million (2022 USD) for workers generally, but it could be higher or lower than the average amount depending on worker preferences and job opportunities. This article finds that Black workers have a VSL below the national average based on several different sp…
Employer Monopsony Power Does Not Reduce the Value of a Statistical Life
Although wage rates are lower when employers have monopsony power, we find that the value of a statistical life (VSL) is not reduced when labor markets are more concentrated. Because the estimated VSL is the product of the wage and the wage-risk tradeoff rate, a greater tradeoff rate in highly concentrated U.S. labor markets produces a larger VSL. The general relationship we find is robust with respect to different labor market data. Our results …
Valuing Heat-Related Mortality Risks
Heat-related mortality risks are a substantial component of the looming costs of climate change in the United States and globally. This article presents the results from a risk-risk survey to test whether U.S. respondents place a valuation premium on mortality risks from heat relative to cancer and transportation risks. The questionnaire exploits exogenous shocks to temperatures during a heat wave and randomized elements to further test whether p…
The Military VSL
Our research reviews theory and evidence in the economics literature to provide a standard value of a statistical life (VSL) applicable to the Department of Defense (DOD). We follow Viscusi (Best estimate selection bias in the value of a statistical life, Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis , 9(2), 205–246, 2018a) by conducting a meta-analysis of 1,025 VSL estimates from 68 different labor market studies and find a best-set average VSL estimate of $…
Viscusi Circular A-4 Peer Review Comments and Guidance for Future Revisions
This article presents my 2023 peer review panel comments on the 2023 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-4 and offers recommendations for future revisions of this circular. The Prologue section introduces my official peer review comments and indicates how the structure of my comments was tailored to the guidelines established by the OMB. The main section consists of my 2023 peer review comments as they were submitted to OMB. I recomm…
Why Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Social Welfare Function Is Not Society’s Social Welfare Function
In 2023, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued guidance documents that specified new procedures for assessing prospective government regulations (Circular A-4) and economic policies more generally (Circular A-94). These revisions to long-standing guidance were not minor updates but shifted policy analyses from an efficiency-oriented perspective to a redistributive approach. OMB broadened the guidelines for reporting distributional…
A Tale of the Tails
The considerable literature on the value of a statistical life (VSL) documents the wage-mortality risk trade-offs for the working population. Regulatory analyses often must monetize risks to populations at the tails of the age distribution. Because of the longer life expectancy for children, there have been proposals to add a premium to their VSL, which would generate an inconsistency with revealed preference estimates of the VSL trajectory over …
Changes in household recycling behavior
When Patients are Assailants
Intentional violence against healthcare workers inflicts a physical and mental toll, motivating legislative proposals to better regulate these occupational risks. This article uses this context to address two novel issues for benefit assessment raised by injuries from assailants: potential heterogeneity in valuation based on the context of the injury risk and possible reductions in self-reported valuations when the exposed population has been tra…
Promoting Equity through Equitable Risk Tradeoffs
The impact and economic merits of President Biden’s Executive Order 13985 on equity depend on how the executive order is implemented. While policy discussion to date has focused on equitable outcomes, we propose framing risk equity policies in terms of equitable risk tradeoff rates based on six policy guidelines. The starting point for ex ante evaluation of equity for mortality risk policies should be the symmetric application of the value of a s…
Differences by Race and Ethnicity in Title IX’s Effect on Women’s Health
Title IX greatly expanded adolescent females’ participation in athletic activities, which may have led to health benefits that extend into later life. Previous research has not explored whether health benefits arising from Title IX differ by race or ethnicity and has not examined women at older ages when health problems become more evident. This article examines the effect of Title IX on racial and ethnicity disparities in health outcomes by cons…
Seven Recommendations for Pricing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The social cost of greenhouse gases is important in many regulatory impact analyses. However, calculations of the social cost of greenhouse gases are highly complex and periodically revisited. We offer seven recommendations to improve current estimates. These include recommendations to use both country-level and global measures of the social cost of greenhouse gases, to use country-specific values for monetizing climate damages, to represent unce…
The Broad Impacts of Disposable Lighter Safety Regulations
The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s regulation of disposable lighters was targeted at preventing injuries due to use of lighters by children not over 4 years of age. Based on a difference-in-differences analysis of national data for 1990–2019, this article estimates that the regulation reduced all injuries to the target population by 71%, burn injuries by 74%, and injuries severe enough to warrant admission to the hospital by 85% overall and…
Efficiency criteria for nudges and norms
How regulations undervalue occupational fatalities
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration establishes incentives for safety by setting and enforcing regulatory standards. Using four and a half decades of inspection data, this article provides a comprehensive analysis of the factors underpinning penalties following fatalities. The “fatality premium” for regulatory violations following a worker death is quite modest and is several orders of magnitude below the value‐of‐a‐statistical…
Catastrophic Risk
Wellbeing measures of mortality risks
The value of a statistical life (VSL) monetizes the expected loss in wellbeing associated with the risk of death. The utility loss resulting from a fatality is central to the empirical framework for estimating the VSL. The VSL trajectory over the life cycle exhibits an inverted-U shape, following a trajectory similar to that of lifetime patterns of consumption. The U-shaped pattern displayed by happiness measures over the life cycle is the opposi…
Publication Selection Biases in Stated Preference Estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life
This article presents the first meta-analysis documenting the extent of publication selection biases in stated preference estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL). Stated preference studies fail to overcome the publication biases that affect much of the VSL literature. Such biases account for approximately 90% of the mean value of published VSL estimates in this subset of the literature. The bias is greatest for the largest estimates, p…
The Perception and Excessive Valuation of Small, Publicized Drinking Water Risks
Low probability risks create challenges for individual decisions and potential pressures for government regulation. This article reports original survey evidence regarding the public’s perception and valuation of water-related risks from plastic bottles with bisphenol A, residues in drinking water of the herbicide atrazine, and trace amounts of prescription drugs in water. People who believe that they face high water-related risks generally belie…
Extending the Domain of the Value of a Statistical Life
The value of a statistical life (VSL) establishes the money-risk tradeoff that U.S. government agencies have used for four decades to monetize the mortality reduction benefits of proposed regulations. This article advocates the adoption of the VSL more generally both for policy evaluation purposes and for setting the magnitude of regulatory sanctions involving fatalities. Agencies currently employ the inconsistent practice of using the VSL to set…
Responsible Precautions for Uncertain Environmental Risks
Uncertain future risks pose cognitive and analytical challenges to household decision makers. Risks with uncertain probabilities, coupled with potentially severe outcomes pose problems for decision-making and are prone to overreactions. Imprecision in risk estimates generates behavioral distortions such as ambiguity aversion. This article presents new empirical results indicating household overvaluations of uncertain threats posed by several drin…
Pricing Lives
Pricing Lives
Dynamic relationships between social norms and pro-environmental behavior
Social norms are strongly associated with pro-environmental behaviors, but the evolution and dynamic effects of norms are less well understood. This article builds on the distinction of norms being descriptive, characterizing what people actually do, or injunctive, characterizing what people should do. It identifies four categories of norms with the further distinction of whether the norms arise from the personal beliefs and actions or from the b…
The Income Elasticity of Global Values of a Statistical Life
Examination of estimates of the income elasticity of the value of a statistical life based on international stated preference studies yields an average between 0.94 and 1.05 overall and 0.65 and 0.80 after controlling for covariates. Quantile regression estimates indicate that the income elasticity is about 0.55 for more affluent countries and 1.0 for lower income nations, i.e., those countries that have estimates of the value of a statistical li…
Do Smokers Underestimate Risks
This paper uses a national survey of 3,119 individuals to examine the effect of lung cancer risk perceptions on smoking activity. Both smokers and nonsmokers greatly overestimated the lung cancer risk of cigarette smoking, and the extent of the overestimation is much greater than the extent of underestimation. These risk perceptions in turn significantly reduce the probability of smoking, as suggested by an economic model of risky consumption dec…
Income Elasticities and Global Values of a Statistical Life
Countries throughout the world use estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) to monetize fatality risks in benefit-cost analyses. However, the vast majority of countries lack reliable revealed preference or stated preference estimates of the VSL. This article proposes that the best way to calculate a population-average VSL for countries with insufficient or unreliable data is to transfer a base VSL from the United States calculated using…
The devaluation of life
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been the target of two recent controversies involving the devaluation of life: the 2003 use of a senior discount for the value of statistical life for people over age 65, and the 2008 downward reassessment of the value of statistical life by the EPA Air Office. Even though these new values of statistical life were still among the highest used in the Federal government, there was a strong negative p…
Alarmist Decisions with Divergent Risk Information
Journal Article Alarmist Decisions with Divergent Risk Information Get access W. Kip Viscusi W. Kip Viscusi Harvard Law School Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 107, Issue 445, 1 November 1997, Pages 1657–1670, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.1997.tb00073.x Published: 27 January 2012 Article history Received: 01 January 1997 Published: 27 January 2012
Doubling the Estimated Value of Life
Michael J. Moore, W. Kip Viscusi, Doubling the Estimated Value of Life: Results Using New Occupational Fatality Data, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring, 1988), pp. 476-490
Altruistic and Private Valuations of Risk Reduction
To remedy the neglect of altruism in benefit assessments for risk regulation programs, this article reports the findings of a new survey of 785 consumers regarding their valuation of two pairs of risks from insecticide. The risk-dollar tradeoffs revealed by consumers averaged $2, 080 and $3, 680 per injury pair prevented within the household; they were willing to pay $5.01 and $9.06 per 1000 injury pairs prevented in the rest of the state and $1.…
Promoting Equity through Equitable Risk Tradeoffs
The impact and economic merits of President Biden’s Executive Order 13985 on equity depend on how the executive order is implemented. While policy discussion to date has focused on equitable outcomes, we propose framing risk equity policies in terms of equitable risk tradeoff rates based on six policy guidelines. The starting point for ex ante evaluation of equity for mortality risk policies should be the symmetric application of the value of a s…
Best Estimate Selection Bias in the Value of a Statistical Life
Selection of the best estimates of economic parameters frequently relies on the “best estimates” or a meta-analysis of the “best set” of parameter estimates from the literature. Using an all-set dataset consisting of all reported estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) as well as a best-set sample of the best estimates from these studies, this article estimates statistically significant publication selection biases in each case. Biases…
Hazard Communication
Risk information can alter risk judgments and promote sound risk decisions. Hazard warnings are critical in providing such information. Both right-to-know and duty-to-warn obligations reflect this. Evidence suggests that warnings can significantly affect risk-taking decisions, but care is needed in interpreting whether their influence leads to successful outcomes. Hazard warnings must accommodate individuals' cognitive limitations. Salient proble…
Publication Selection Biases in Stated Preference Estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life
This article presents the first meta-analysis documenting the extent of publication selection biases in stated preference estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL). Stated preference studies fail to overcome the publication biases that affect much of the VSL literature. Such biases account for approximately 90% of the mean value of published VSL estimates in this subset of the literature. The bias is greatest for the largest estimates, p…
Consumer’s Guide to Regulatory Impact Analysis
Regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) weigh the benefits of regulations against the burdens they impose and are invaluable tools for informing decision makers. We offer 10 tips for nonspecialist policymakers and interested stakeholders who will be reading RIAs as consumers. 1. Core problem: Determine whether the RIA identifies the core problem (compelling public need) the regulation is intended to address. 2. Alternatives: Look for an objective, poli…
The Risk Management Dilemma
Market processes play a central and constructive role in allocating risks, but impediments such as inaccurately perceived risks and externalities create a potential role for government intervention. Individuals overestimate small risks, are averse to imprecisely understood risks, and give excessive weight to errors of commission over errors of omission. The challenge for the government is to strike an appropriate balance in its risk regulation ef…
Product Liability, Research and Development, and Innovation
Product liability ideally should promote efficient levels of product safety but misdirected liability efforts may depre ss beneficial innovations. This paper examines these competing effects of liability costs on product R&D intensity and new product introductio ns by manufacturing firms. At low to moderate levels of expected liabil ity costs, there is a positive effect of liability costs on product innovation. At very high levels of liability co…
Dynamic relationships between social norms and pro-environmental behavior
Social norms are strongly associated with pro-environmental behaviors, but the evolution and dynamic effects of norms are less well understood. This article builds on the distinction of norms being descriptive, characterizing what people actually do, or injunctive, characterizing what people should do. It identifies four categories of norms with the further distinction of whether the norms arise from the personal beliefs and actions or from the b…
The Income Elasticity of Global Values of a Statistical Life
Examination of estimates of the income elasticity of the value of a statistical life based on international stated preference studies yields an average between 0.94 and 1.05 overall and 0.65 and 0.80 after controlling for covariates. Quantile regression estimates indicate that the income elasticity is about 0.55 for more affluent countries and 1.0 for lower income nations, i.e., those countries that have estimates of the value of a statistical li…
The Fail-Safe Society
A Tale of the Tails
The considerable literature on the value of a statistical life (VSL) documents the wage-mortality risk trade-offs for the working population. Regulatory analyses often must monetize risks to populations at the tails of the age distribution. Because of the longer life expectancy for children, there have been proposals to add a premium to their VSL, which would generate an inconsistency with revealed preference estimates of the VSL trajectory over …
Efficiency criteria for nudges and norms
Responsible Precautions for Uncertain Environmental Risks
Uncertain future risks pose cognitive and analytical challenges to household decision makers. Risks with uncertain probabilities, coupled with potentially severe outcomes pose problems for decision-making and are prone to overreactions. Imprecision in risk estimates generates behavioral distortions such as ambiguity aversion. This article presents new empirical results indicating household overvaluations of uncertain threats posed by several drin…
Economic Foundations of the Current Regulatory Reform Efforts
Regulatory reform proposals before Congress would potentially increase the role of economics in regulatory policymaking. These reforms seek to override existing legislative mandates, which usually prohibit economic trade-offs and have often led to inefficient expenditures. Proposed legislation would preempt these requirements and improve benefit-cost tests, making economic assessment a focal point of regulatory policy debates. Other reforms, such…
Reforming Products Liability
Preface 1. Diagnosing the Liability Crisis Perspectives on Liability Reform Recent Trends in Products Liability Proposals for Reform 2. The Dimensions of the Liability Crisis Accident Rates Decline, But Litigation Soars The Surge in Asbestos Litigation Insurance Industry Trends Roots of the Insurance Crisis, 1980-1984 Other Economic Effects of Products Liability The Design Defect Doctrine and Hazard Warnings 3. The Litigation Process The Overall …
Product and Occupational Liability
Increased liability for risks posed by jobs and products has transformed the cost structure of job and product markets. Liability costs used to be an incidental expense; now they are a factor of substantial economic consequence. The costs associated with a more active economic role of liability are not necessarily undesirable. However, examination of the economic objectives of the liability system will indicate that the current structure is not i…
Presidential Oversight
In 1974, President Ford initiated a procedure by which the regulatory policies of federal agencies were subjected to systematic oversight. This activity continued with modest success through subsequent administrations. A substantial stiffening of oversight powers under President Reagan raises basic questions about the best means for performing effective oversight. Proposals for a so-called regulatory budget, within which each agency would be obli…
Seven Recommendations for Pricing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The social cost of greenhouse gases is important in many regulatory impact analyses. However, calculations of the social cost of greenhouse gases are highly complex and periodically revisited. We offer seven recommendations to improve current estimates. These include recommendations to use both country-level and global measures of the social cost of greenhouse gases, to use country-specific values for monetizing climate damages, to represent unce…
Extending the Domain of the Value of a Statistical Life
The value of a statistical life (VSL) establishes the money-risk tradeoff that U.S. government agencies have used for four decades to monetize the mortality reduction benefits of proposed regulations. This article advocates the adoption of the VSL more generally both for policy evaluation purposes and for setting the magnitude of regulatory sanctions involving fatalities. Agencies currently employ the inconsistent practice of using the VSL to set…
Wealth Effects and Earnings Premiums for Job Hazards
A DAM Smith (1937) observed that "the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labor and stock must, in the same neighborhood, be either perfectly equal or continually tending to equality."If a job poses health and safety risks that are especially great, a worker will require higher levels of compensation or greater non-pecuniary benefits in order for him to accept the risky job.Despite the fact that the theory of…
Sex Differences in Worker Quitting
T HE stereotypical view of female employees is that they have relatively weak job attachment and that, in particular, they are especially prone to voluntary job separations. Although this notion is borne out by overall sex differences in aggregative quit rates, this evidence is at best only suggestive since it does not distinguish sex-specific differences in quit behavior from other factors, such as differences in job characteristics and wage rat…
Employment Hazards
The safety of the work place is now a highly visible public issue. Many are calling for tighter regulation to reduce worker risk, while others feel government intervention is ineffective and costly. Here Kip Viscusi explores how well markets for hazardous jobs actually work. According to classical economics, other things being equal, a worker will demand more pay for a hazardous job than a safe one. However, this assumes that job related hazards …
The Informational Requirements for Effective Regulatory Review
The shortcomings of the EPA lead standard were largely determined by the requirements of the Clean Air Act. EPA's analysis was inadequate since the underlying risks were modelled in terms of critical thresholds irrespective of the particular probability of the adverse health outcome associated with the exposure. The informational requirements for meaningful review are compared with the actual benefit and cost data provided by EPA. The misplaced E…
Employment Hazards
Risk by Choice
Risk by Choice
Presidential Oversight
In 1974, President Ford initiated a procedure by which the regulatory policies of federal agencies were subjected to systematic oversight. This activity continued with modest success through subsequent administrations. A substantial stiffening of oversight powers under President Reagan raises basic questions about the best means for performing effective oversight. Proposals for a so-called regulatory budget, within which each agency would be obli…
Risk by Choice? Knowledge and Power in the Hazardous Workplace
Policy Analysis and the Aging
Cotton Dust Regulation
In 1978, OSHA took a major step in attempting to promote the health of workers in the textile industry, tightening its standard on cotton dust levels in textile plants. Because the OSHA cotton dust standard was widely believed to be ineffective, it became the target of a major political debate and a fundamental U.S. Supreme Court decision. The evidence indicates that the standard has had the expected beneficial effect on worker health, and at a c…
Regulating Consumer Product Safety
The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has broad jurisdiction over a wide variety of consumer hazards, with considerable authority both to set product safety regulations and to take actions against hazardous products. How effectively has this authority been exercised
Insurance
The Status of Osha Reform
The status of Osha reform
Since its inception, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been the target of regulatory reform proposals. OSHA has attracted this continued critical attention both because of inadequacies in the design of OSHA regulation and shortcomings in its implementation. John Mendeloff's critique and program of reform for OSHA focus primarily on inadequacies in the structure of OSHA policy rather than its implementation. Within that …
Workers' Compensation
W. Kip Viscusi, Michael J. Moore, Workers' Compensation: Wage Effects, Benefit Inadequacies, and the Value of Health Losses, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 69, No. 2 (May, 1987), pp. 249-261
Doubling the Estimated Value of Life
Michael J. Moore, W. Kip Viscusi, Doubling the Estimated Value of Life: Results Using New Occupational Fatality Data, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring, 1988), pp. 476-490
Altruistic and Private Valuations of Risk Reduction
To remedy the neglect of altruism in benefit assessments for risk regulation programs, this article reports the findings of a new survey of 785 consumers regarding their valuation of two pairs of risks from insecticide. The risk-dollar tradeoffs revealed by consumers averaged $2, 080 and $3, 680 per injury pair prevented within the household; they were willing to pay $5.01 and $9.06 per 1000 injury pairs prevented in the rest of the state and $1.…
The Regulation of Motor Vehicle and Traffic Safety
Safety through markets
Do Smokers Underestimate Risks
This paper uses a national survey of 3,119 individuals to examine the effect of lung cancer risk perceptions on smoking activity. Both smokers and nonsmokers greatly overestimated the lung cancer risk of cigarette smoking, and the extent of the overestimation is much greater than the extent of underestimation. These risk perceptions in turn significantly reduce the probability of smoking, as suggested by an economic model of risky consumption dec…
Estimation of State-Dependent Utility Functions Using Survey Data
Surveys of individual's risk-dollar trade-offs illuminate not only the local trade-off rates, but also can be used to address more fundamental questions about the structure of utility functions. This largely unexplored empirical area is investigated by developing an econometric technique to estimate utility functions based on survey data on risk-dollar trade-offs for minor health effects. The empirical tests indicate that for all but one of the t…
Age Variations in Risk Perceptions and Smoking Decisions
The results of a numerical survey of smoking risks and behavior are analyzed. Smoking risk perceptions follow the expected patterns given age differences in risk information acquired and differences in information associated with smoking status. Risk perceptions are greater as one moves to younger age cohorts where overall lung cancer risks are substantially overestimated. These risk perceptions in turn have a negative effect on smoking decisions…
Product and Occupational Liability
Increased liability for risks posed by jobs and products has transformed the cost structure of job and product markets. Liability costs used to be an incidental expense; now they are a factor of substantial economic consequence. The costs associated with a more active economic role of liability are not necessarily undesirable. However, examination of the economic objectives of the liability system will indicate that the current structure is not i…
Worker Learning and Compensating Differentials
The authors hypothesize that in industries with relatively high levels of job-related injury risk, workers with longer job tenure will more clearly appreciate the degree of job risk than will newly hired workers, and will thus be more willing to accept lower wages in return for higher workers' compensation benefits. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of quit behavior using 1981-83 data from the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics and…
Economics (58 works) · Business (46 works) · Political science (31 works) · Economic and Environmental Valuation (30 works) · Actuarial science (27 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Public economics (20 works) · Econometrics (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works)