Economists have long employed hedonic wage analysis to estimate income-fatality risk trade-offs, but some scholars have raised concerns about systematic measurement error and omitted variable bias in the empirical applications of this model. Recent studies have employed panel methods to remove time-invariant individual-specific characteristics that could induce bias in estimation. In an analogous manner, this paper proposes to exploit assortative matching on risk attitudes within married couples to control for worker characteristics that are unobserved to the econometrician. I develop and implement a modified hedonic wage estimator based on a within-couple differenced wage equation for full-time working married couples with the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group over 1996-2002. The key assumption builds on the findings in the assortative matching literature that individuals often marry those who have common traits across many dimensions, including those that may influence worker wages and are correlated with observed occupational fatality risks. This estimator identifies the compensating differential for occupation fatality risk by using within-couple differencing to remove unobserved determinants of risk attitudes and risk-mitigation ability, on which couples match, from the error term. I find that the value of statistical life (VSL) varies from $9 to $13 million (2016$). The within-couple differenced VSL estimates are stable and more robust to variation in specification of the hedonic wage model than conventional, cross-sectional hedonic wage models. I also find that the value of statistical life takes an inverted-U shape with respect to age.

中文翻译：

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羽毛鸟：估计双职工家庭的统计生命价值

长期以来，经济学家一直采用享乐主义的工资分析法来估计收入-致命性风险的权衡，但是一些学者对这种系统的计量误差表示担忧，并在该模型的经验应用中忽略了变量偏差。最近的研究已经采用面板方法去除了时不变的个体特异性特征，这些特征可能引起估计偏差。以类似的方式，本文建议对已婚夫妇的风险态度进行分类匹配，以控制计量经济学家无法观察到的工人特征。我根据“当前人口调查合并外出轮岗”组在1996-2002年间针对全职工作已婚夫妇的夫妻内部差异工资方程，开发并实现了一种改良的享乐主义工资估算器。关键的假设是建立在各种匹配文献的发现基础之上的，即个体通常会与那些在许多方面具有共同特征的人结婚，包括那些可能影响工人工资并与所观察到的职业死亡风险相关的特征。该估计器通过使用夫妻内部差异来从误差项中删除夫妻之间匹配的风险态度和风险缓解能力的不确定因素，从而确定职业死亡风险的补偿差额。我发现统计生命（VSL）的价值从9美元到1300万美元（2016年）不等。与传统的横截面享乐工资模型相比，耦合内差异VSL估算值稳定且对享乐工资模型的规格变化更鲁棒。