Alternative Approaches to Valuing the Health Impacts of Accidents: Liability Law and Prospective Evaluations

The task of valuing accidental injuries and deaths is intrinsically difficult for two reasons. First, unlike standard consumer commodities, individual health is not traded explicitly on the market. It may be traded implicitly as with wage premiums for risky jobs, but these implicit prices must be estimated statistically. The second problem is that the value one places on any economic commodity depends on the welfare one can derive from it. Since adverse health effects influence the