Transportation Choices , Fatalism and the Value of Life in Africa *

We exploit a unique transportation setting to estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL) in Africa. We observe choices made by travelers to and from the airport in Freetown, Sierra Leone (which is separated from the city by a body of water) among transport options – namely, ferry, helicopter, speed boat, and hovercraft – each with differential historical mortality risk and monetary and time costs, and estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make using a discrete choice model. These revealed preference VSL estimates also exploit exogenous variation in travel risk generated by daily weather shocks, e.g. rainfall. We find that African travelers have very low willingness to pay for marginal reductions in mortality risk, with an estimated average VSL close to zero. Our sample of African airport travelers report high incomes (close to average U.S. levels), and likely have relatively long remaining life expectancy, ruling out the two most obvious explanations for the low value of life. Alternative explanations, such as those based on cultural factors, including the well-documented fatalism found in many West African societies, appear more promising. * We thank Wendy Abt for conversations in Freetown that led to this project. Tom Polley provided excellent research assistance. Seminar audiences at U.C. Berkeley and PACDEV 2010 provided helpful comments. We appreciate the valuable input from Orley Ashenfelter, Fred Finan, Michael Greenstone, Kurt Lavetti and Enrico Moretti. All errors remain our own. Contact: G. León: gianmarco@berkeley.edu; E. Miguel: emiguel@econ.berkeley.edu.