TY  - BOOK
AU  - Greenberg,Kyle
AU  - Greenstone,Michael
AU  - Ryan,Stephen P.
AU  - Yankovich,Michael
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Heterogeneous Value of a Statistical Life: Evidence from U.S. Army Reenlistment Decisions 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2021///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - July 2021; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - This paper estimates the value of a statistical life (VSL), or the willingness to trade-off wealth and mortality risk, among 430,000 U.S. Army soldiers choosing whether to reenlist between 2002 and 2010. Using a discrete choice random utility approach and significant variation in retention bonuses and mortality risk, we recover average VSL estimates that range between $500,000 and $900,000, an order of magnitude smaller than U.S. civilian labor market estimates. Additionally, we fulfill Rosen's (1974) vision to recover indifference curves between wealth and non-market goods (e.g., mortality risk) and document substantial heterogeneity in preferences across types. We find that the VSL increases rapidly with mortality risk within type, and that soldiers in combat occupations have much lower VSLs than those in noncombat occupations. We estimate that the quadrupling of mortality risk from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars reduced annual welfare by $2,355 per soldier, roughly 8 percent of pay
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w29104
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w29104
ER  -