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Full-Text Articles in Law

Safety At Any Price, W. Kip Viscusi Jan 2002

Safety At Any Price, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

After three decades of experience with extensive government regulation and oversight of health, safety and environmental matters, we have reason to believe that those measures have largely failed to fulfill their initial promise, but many of the initial promises were infeasible goals of a "zero-risk" society. Economic findings with respect to risk-risk tradeoffs highlight the fallacies inherent in government's zero-risk mentality. Agencies that make an unbounded financial commitment to safety frequently are sacrificing individual lives. There continues to be major opportunities to improve regulatory performance by targeting existing inefficiencies and using market mechanisms (rather than strict command-and-control mechanisms) to achieve …


The Market Value Of Reducing Cancer Risk: Hedonic Housing Prices With Changing Information, W. Kip Viscusi, Ted Gayer, James T. Hamilton Jan 2002

The Market Value Of Reducing Cancer Risk: Hedonic Housing Prices With Changing Information, W. Kip Viscusi, Ted Gayer, James T. Hamilton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this paper, we use housing price changes occurring after the release of a regulatory agency's environmental risk information to estimate the value people place on cancer risk reduction. Using a large original data set on the repeat sales of houses, matched with detailed data on hazardous waste cancer risk and newspaper publicity, we find that housing prices respond in a rational manner to changes in information about risk. Since the new information indicated that the sites in our sample pose relatively low cancer risk, the informational release led residents to lower their risk beliefs, resulting in an average housing …