Harvard Center for Risk Analysis

Risk Assessment, Economic Evaluation, and Decisions Workshop

Workshop Agenda and Papers

**Read our Risk Analysis special issue**

The Risk Assessment, Economic Evaluation, and Decisions workshop included presentation and discussion of a series of papers building on work by John S. Evans and designed to improve the integration of risk assessment and economic evaluation. The agenda appears below along with links to the most recent versions of the papers; the program can be downloaded here. The presenter is marked with an asterisk (*).

We are updating this page periodically to add links to the final versions of the papers as they are published. Several papers were published in a special issue of Risk Analysis, along with a profile of John S. Evans authored by Michael Greenberg and Karen Lowrie. The introduction to the special issue is available here.

We are very pleased that one of the papers from the special issue received the 2021 SRA Best Paper Award:

Thursday, September 26

8:00-8:40: Registration and Breakfast

8:40-9:00: Welcome and Introduction (James K. Hammitt and Lisa A. Robinson)

9:00-10:30: Clarifying Concepts (chair, Lisa A. Robinson)

  • Katherine von Stackelberg* and Pamela Williams.* Evolving Science and Practice of Risk Assessment (journal article)
  • Kevin Brand,* Zihan Lin, David Stieb, and Richard Burnett. Converting between Measures of Health Impact: Health Gap to Health Expectancy (paper)
  • James K. Hammitt,* Peter Morfeld, Jouni Tuomisto, and Thomas C. Erren. Premature Deaths, Statistical Lives, and Years of Life Lost: Identification, Quantification, and Valuation of Mortality Risks (journal article) (Risk in Perspective summary)

10:30-11:00: Break

11:00-12:30: Integration and Modeling (chair, Kimberly Thompson)

  • Christoph Rheinberger.* A Unified Probabilistic Framework for Cancer Risk Management (journal article)
  • Weihsueh Chiu* and Greg Paoli. Recent Advances in Probabilistic Dose-Response Assessment to Inform Risk-Based Decision Making (journal article)
  • Jonathan Levy.* Accounting for Health Risk Inequality in Regulatory Impact Analysis: Barriers and Opportunities (journal article)

12:30-2:00: Lunch

2:00-4:00: Air Pollution Concentration-Response Functions (chair, Katherine Walker)

  • C. Arden Pope, III,* Nathan Coleman, Zachari A. Pond, and Richard T. Burnett. Fine Particulate Air Pollution and Human Mortality: 25+ Years of Cohort Studies (journal article)
  • Patrick Kinney.* Long‐Term Effects of Fine Particles on Mortality: Insights from 1984 (journal article)
  • Meng Gao,* Kirk R. Smith, Jos Lelieveld, Frank Dentener, Jason West, Jianlin Hu, Ken Kin Lam Yung, Patrick Kinney, John Evans, Zifa Wang, and Chris P. Nielsen. Where Does Ambient PM2.5 Come from in China: A Comparison and Synthesis of Recent Estimates  (paper)
  • Elisabeth Gilmore,* Jinhyok Heo, Nicholas Z. Muller, Christopher W. Tessum, Jason D. Hill, Julian D. Marshall, and Peter J. Adams. An Inter-Comparison of the Social Costs of Air Quality from Reduced-Complexity Models (journal article)

4:00-4:30: Break

4:30-5:30: Decision-Making (chair, Dennis Paustenbach)

  • Roger Cooke,* Deniz Marti, and Thomas Mazzuchi . Expert Judgment and the Inevitability of Validation (paper)
  • John Graham,* Jonathan Wiener,* and Lisa A. Robinson. Co-Benefits, Countervailing Risks, and Cost-Benefit Analysis (paper)

5:30: Wrap-up (Lisa A. Robinson)

Friday, September 27

8:00-8:25: Registration and Breakfast

8:25-8:30: Welcome (Lisa A. Robinson)

8:30-10:00: Health Applications (chair, TJ Carrothers)

  • Aylin Sertkaya, Amber Jessup,* and Rebecca DeVries. Cost of Developing a Therapeutic Complex Medical Device for the U.S. Market (paper)
  • Olivier Jolliet,* Lei Huang, Ping Hou, and Peter Fantke. High Throughput Risks and Impact Screening of Chemicals in Consumer Products (journal article)
  • Scott Grosse and Ying Zhou.* Monetary Valuation of Children’s Cognitive Outcomes in
    Economic Evaluations from a Societal Perspective: A Review (journal article)

10:00-10:30: Break

10:30-12:30: Air Pollution Warnings and Other Applications (chair, Adrián Fernández Bremauntz)

  • Joseph Aldy,* Jing Cao, and Nan Zhong. Learning to Avoid Pollution: Public Health Benefits from Beijing’s Air Quality Index Forecast (paper)
  • Jonathan J. Buonocore,* Lisa A. Robinson, James K. Hammitt, and Lucy O’Keeffe. Estimating the Potential Health Benefits of Air Quality Warnings (journal article)
  • Henry Roman, James E. Neumann,* Stefani Penn, Alisa White, and Neal Fann. Dynamic Versus Static Modeling of Mortality-related Benefits of PM Reductions in the US and Chile: 1990 – 2050 (journal article)
  • John S. Evans, Leonora Rojas-Bracho,* James K. Hammitt, and Douglas W. Dockery. Mortality Benefits and Control Costs of Improving Air Quality in Mexico City: The Case of Heavy Duty Diesel Vehicles (journal article)

12:30-1:30: Lunch

1:30-2:30: Economics  (chair, Sandra Baird)

  • Sandra Hoffmann,* Lydia Ashton, Jessica Todd, and Peter Berck. What Food Purchase Data Can Tell Us about Campylobacteriosis in the U.S. (paper)
  • Daniel Herrera-Araujo* and James K. Hammitt. Using Non-Marginal Risk Reductions to Elicit Value Per Statistical Life (VSL) (paper)

2:30-3:00: Break

3:00-5:00: Successes and Failures of Risk Analysis: Lessons for the Future (chair, James K. Hammitt)

  • Adam Finkel* and George Gray.* The Pebble Remains in the Master’s Hand: Two Careers Spent Learning (Still) from John Evans (journal article)
  • Discussion with opening remarks from Roger Cooke, Olivier Jolliet, and Kimberly Thompson

5:00: Final Words (James K. Hammitt)