The Value of a Statistical Life in Chile

In this article we estimate the Value of a Statistical Life and the Value of a Statistical Injury for Chilean workers using a combination of data from the Chilean National Socio-Economic Survey that provides workers characteristics and the Annually Statistics from the Chilean Safety Association that provides labor risk data, both for the year 2006. we estimated a hedonic log-wage equation taking into account selection bias and endogeneity. The estimated Value of a Statistical Life is US$3,683,471, which increases five times after correcting by endogeneity (US$19,582,842). On the other hand, the estimated Value of a Statistical Injury is US$57,936 of 2006. The uncorrected results are lower than the values reported by Viscusi and Aldy (2003) for various developed countries but greater than those estimated using indirect approaches by Miller (2000) and Bowland and Beghin (2001) for Chile. That suggests that the indirect approaches, such the extrapolation of estimates from developed to developing countries is inappropriate.