Beyond GDP: Is there a law of one shadow price?

Abstract

This paper builds a welfare measure encompassing household disposable income, unemployment and longevity, which are valued either from life satisfaction data (“subjective shadow prices”) or from calibrated utility functions (“model-based shadow prices”). The two different sets of shadow prices are shown to be broadly consistent once a number of conditions are fulfilled: i) running life satisfaction regressions at the country level rather than at the individual level to reduce the downward bias on the income variable due to measurement errors; (ii) valuing the unemployment risk in a state-contingent framework rather than under the veil of ignorance; (iii) disentangling relative risk aversion parameters for unemployment and vital risks; (iv) calibrating the utility function on adult lifespan rather than life expectancy at birth.