Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
Living large or long: Preference estimates from completed-life stories
with Amitabh Chandra, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, and Joshua Schwartzstein
Abstract
The value people attach to longevity increases is an important input to policy decisions on health care, the environment, and safety regulations. This value is typically estimated based on compensating differentials for taking on very small risks of death. We instead estimate this value by letting people choose between completed life stories in which life-time income and longevity is randomized. We present a battery of tests to gauge whether these hypothetical choices measure underlying preferences. The benefit of our method is that it does not require people to correctly evaluate very small probabilities, yields estimates of the distribution of preferences for longevity in a representative population, and allows for a characterization of heterogeneity in preferences by respondent characteristics.
Language
English
This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.