How Do Legislators Value Constituent’s (Statistical) Lives? COVID-19, Partisanship, and Value of a Statistical Life Analysis

Value of statistical life (VSL) analysis is common place in policy circles to evaluate the effectiveness of policy. As I show using a novel survey experiment with United States' state legislators, actual use of VSL analysis faces several problems. Firstly, policy preferences are inelastic, unchanging, regardless of the cost. Secondly, policy preferences are determined in large by actors' party ID. This means that VSL analysis, in practice, will either encourage policies that are too risky to too risk adverse.

Some uses, underuses, and misuses of the findings of disparities between people’s valuations of gains and losses

The well-known behavioural finding that losses have a greater impact on people’s well-being than gains, has important implications for the study of individual and collective choices, as well as the ways in which analyses are carried out -- many more than have yet been seriously considered. It also has many for analysts’ use of such tools as price elasticities, discount rates, value of statistical lives, risk analysis, and the like. A greater recognition of the behavioral findings would likely lead to reductions of the biases in many present analyses.