Date(s): October 1, 2009, 10:30am

Location: Room 4128, EPA West, 1301 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC

Contact: Carl Pasurka, 202-566-2275

Presenter(s): Anna Alberini (Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Maryland)

Description: The speaker will present the results of conjoint choice experiments designed to estimate child and adult VSL in contexts appropriate for environmental policy analyses. Our survey was self-administered by parents at two centralized facilities in Milan, Italy, and in the major cities and a handful of smaller towns in the Czech Republic.

In Italy, Child VSL is €4.6 million, and adult VSL is €4.0. These figures are not statistically different from one another. The VSL does vary systematically with the cause of death. It is higher when the cause of death is cancer than for respiratory illnesses and road-traffic accidents, with cancer premia of 30% and 53%, respectively. The cancer premium is especially pronounced for adults. The responses to the choice questions are internally valid, and show that the VSL depends on cause of death, whether the risk reduction is private or delivered by a public program, dread, perceived exposure, and sensitivity to the specified cause of death.

Seminar Category: Environmental Economics