In 2020, I was awarded the ANR JCJC grant to work on the value of mortality and morbidity in France from 2021 until 2024.

This project is motivated by the increasing need for economic tools enabling French authorities to rank policies that seek to reduce risks to life and limb. As of 2012, the multi-annual French public budget programming bill requires that for all publicly funded investments a full socioeconomic evaluation be carried out before implementation. Government agencies around the world, including French authorities, typically employ estimates of the value per statistical life (VSL) to quantify the benefits of regulation-induced or investment-induced changes in mortality risk. In the socioeconomic evaluation sphere, VSL is one of the most influential metrics.

A first objective of our research aims at empirically eliciting both the VSL and the WTP for improved quality-of-life in France, as well as the bounds on the WTP for improved quality-of-life. The project’s second objective is to provide empirical support for an innovative method for estimating VSL in stated preferences surveys: the use of non-marginal risk reductions.