Andersson, Henrik (2020) The value of a statistical life. In: Standard Transport Appraisal Methods Mouter, Niek (ed.) Academic Press. Series “Advances in Transport Policy and Planning”, Vol. 6. Chapter 3. pp. 75-99. ISBN 978-0-12-820821-2

Abstract

The monetary value of preventing one statistical death is usually defined as the value of a statistical life (VSL), which is the focus of this chapter. It represents how much society would be willing to spend to prevent one unidentified death, but since no easily available prices exist for this value, non-market valuation approaches like stated- (SP) and revealed-preference (RP) methods need to be used to obtain it. We will in the chapter describe the theoretical economic model behind the VSL concept and the most common empirical SP and RP techniques used to obtain monetary estimates of the VSL.