The Value of a Statistical Life in a Dictatorship — Paul Castañeda Dower (09.07.2017)

What is the value of a statistical life (VSL) in a dictatorship? We structurally estimate the trade-off between monetary costs and fatality risk in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime. Using regional variation in the level of political victims during the Great Terror, we estimate this VSL to be approximately $43,000, 6% of the VSL estimate of US in 1940 and 29% of the modern VSL estimate in India. These findings are the first explicit attempt to measure VSL in a dictatorship and are a novel contribution to the debate on autocracies versus democracies.