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Contribution Details

Type Working Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Did we Overestimate the Value of Health?
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Rafael Lalive
Language
  • English
Institution University of Zurich
Series Name Working paper series / Institute for Empirical Research in Economics
Number No. 60
ISSN 1424-0459
Date 2000
Abstract Text Adam Smith's idea that wage differences reveal preferences for risk rests on firm theoretical foundations. This paper argues, however, that the standard approach to identify these differentials in practice may be flawed. Empirical practice usually identifies compensating wage differentials for risk by regressing individual wages on aggregate measures of risk, usually industry or occupation average risk. If jobs differ within industries or occupations, the ''aggregate approach'' may identify arbitrary compensating differentials for risk. In a dataset with precise information on job risk as well as aggregate risk, I demonstrate that using aggregate risk identifies wage differentials that are two to five times larger than wage differentials based on job riskninformation. This result is robust to controlling for time constant unobserved individual or job heterogeneity.
Official URL http://www.econ.uzh.ch/wp.html
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