Estimating British workers' demand for safety

Document Type

Journal article

Source Publication

Applied Economics

Publication Date

1-1-1999

Volume

31

Issue

10

First Page

1265

Last Page

1271

Publisher

Routledge Journals

Abstract

This paper estimates workers' demand function for job safety using the British General Household Survey data. The estimation employs Rosen's two-stage procedure. The main difference between our study and those done in the past is that we estimate hedonic price equations with data sets from two labour markets. Our approach overcomes the usual identification problems associated with the application of Rosen's method. The estimation shows that there is a significant wage compensation for job risk in the UK. The willingness-to-pay for a 1/100 000 decrease of annual job fatal accident rate from our estimated workers' demand function is about £6 in 1973 prices. The estimation of a demand function for safety also enables the derivation of workers' willingness-to-pay for non-marginal change of job risk, and this can be used for cost-benefit analysis on projects involving such non-marginal changes.

DOI

10.1080/000368499323472

Print ISSN

00036846

Publisher Statement

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Full-text Version

Publisher’s Version

Language

English

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