Economics Research Seminar – Dr Rebecca McDonald

Title: Are Distributional Preferences for Safety Linked to Age and Health Status?

Date: 27 November 2024

Time: 13:30 – 14:30

Venue: NUBS.4.23

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:

Are Distributional Preferences for Safety Linked to Age and Health Status?

Speaker:  Dr Rebecca McDonald, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Birmingham

https://sites.google.com/view/rebeccamcdonald/home

Abstract:

How should society prioritise the distribution of safety resources? Standard Cost Benefit Analysis approaches tend to assume that every life is equally worth prioritising. In contrast, theory and empirical evidence suggests that the value of risk reductions might depend on the characteristics of the beneficiaries, such as age and health status, but there is no consensus about the direction or magnitude of these effects. We use a survey-experiment to understand the preferences of members of the public over the role that age and health status should play in the allocation of scarce safety resources. We vary the perspective of the decider, sometimes an impartial social planner and sometimes a member of the affected society. We demonstrate that people prioritise younger beneficiaries, but that they do not prioritise differently on the basis of health status. Self-interest shifts preferences slightly in the anticipated direction, but not sufficiently to overturn the main preference towards younger beneficiaries. We discuss the potential implications of these findings for safety policy-making.