Description: This article discusses calculating changes in worklife expectancies and lost earnings in personal injury cases. Abstract: This paper utilizes the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) new worklife tables' information on workforce participation probabilities to estimate the effect of an injury on a worker's life expectancy, worklife expectancy and discounted expected income. After a medical opinion has been obtained concerning the effect of an injury on a worker's probabilities of living and remaining active, the BLS's probability figures can be adjusted and incorporated into a Markov process to estimate the impact of the injury. It is shown that Alter and Becker's technique can be adapted to estimate the present value of the lost expected income.

Description: This article discusses urban water demand estimates under increasing block rates. A residential water demand equation is estimated using the only data set on water consumption that contains time series (monthly) observations on individual customers facing an increasing block rate schedule. Because the price of water both determines, and is determined by, usage, ordinary least squares estimation will yield biased estimates. Thus, two-stage least squares and instrumental variables techniques are used. The estimated coefficients on lawn size, weather, house size, and income have the expected signs and are statistically significant. However, there is not any significant response to changes in water price, perhaps due to the relatively low cost of water.