The Value of a Statistical Life in a Road Safety Context — A Review of the Current Literature

Abstract

This paper summarizes the state-of-the-art for assessing the value of a statistical life (VSL) as a component of the costs of road accidents. It focuses on the most popular approaches for assessing the VSL, with respect to its theoretical foundations, current state-of-research and empirical evidence. Our paper also provides a first (to our knowledge) compendium of results for the VSL based on Stated Choice (SC) methods. Among the analysed alternatives, the willingness-to-pay (WTP) appears to be the leading approach for assessing the VSL and the SC methods represent the current state-of-the-art for determining the WTP for non-market goods. We conclude that the SC approach overcomes some of the most important shortcomings of the alternative approaches and offers a significant flexibility that can be used to address its own limitations. We also identify a significant need for research, as a gap between the methods employed in research (SC methods) and the state-of-the-practice (other methods) has emerged.