Tag: Loss of Earnings

Are Data from the 2011 Census Reliable?

Posted on By economica

by Christopher J. Bruce

When estimating future earnings in personal injury and fatal accident cases, financial experts often rely on information provided by the Canadian Census. Of particular importance are data concerning incomes by age, sex, occupation, and education. For example, if a 24 year-old male plaintiff would have been a journeyman carpenter, his potential earnings might be based on average incomes for Canadians with that certification, in the age groups 25-29, 30-34, 35-44, etc.

In the past, these data would have been drawn from a section of the Census known as the “long form.” This portion of the Census survey, which contained much more detailed information than on was on the rest of the Census, was given to only one household out of five. (The remainder of the Census survey asks only basic questions about such demographic factors as age, sex, language, and area of residence.)

For the 2011 Census, however, the government decided to replace the long-form questions with a “National Household Survey (NHS).” Although the 2011 NHS asked the same questions as had the 2006 Census long form, whereas the long form had been mandatory, the NHS was voluntary. The result, as had been expected, was that the percentage of households answering this portion of the survey fell significantly, from 93.8% in 2006 to 77.2% in 2011.This created three statistical problems concerning the reliability of the data (variability in small community data, sample error, and non-response bias). As Statistics Canada had anticipated these problems, however, it took steps to mitigate them, steps that have maintained the reliability of the data that are of value to the courts. Wayne R. Smith, Chief Statistician of Canada, recently wrote an article in which he discussed these steps. [“The 2011 National Household Survey – the complete statistical story,” http://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/blog-blogue/cs-sc/2011NHSstory. June 4, 2015.] In this article, I summarise Dr. Smith’s discussion.

Variability in small community data

As the sample size of any survey becomes smaller, the data become less and less reliable, due to an increase in variance. In response, Statistics Canada routinely withholds data concerning the smallest communities. In 2011, they withheld the results from 1,100 such communities, up from 160 in the 2006 Census. That is, all of the data reported in 2011 meet the normal statistical requirements for reliability.

Sample error

As the overall size of a sample decreases, there is an increase in what is known as the “sampling error;” that is, from the problem that the average characteristics of the sample differ from the average of the total population. Because Statistics Canada expected a smaller percentage of households to answer the voluntary NHS than had answered the mandatory long form, they anticipated that the total size of the “sample” (the households answering the survey) would be lower in 2011 than in 2006.

To deal with this problem, Statistics Canada increased the number of households who were asked to answer the long portion of the 2011 Census. Whereas one household in five were asked to answer the 2006 long form, one household in three were asked to answer the NHS. The result was that, even though a smaller percentage of households responded to the NHS than had responded to the 2006 long form, the number of households answering the NHS was higher than in 2006, (2,657,461 versus 2,443,507, representing 6,719,688 versus 2006’s 6,136,517).

Although this approach does not correct for all errors, those errors become less and less important as the data are aggregated. Thus, for example, the data for the average income of all carpenters in Alberta are more reliable than for the average income of carpenters in Calgary.

Non-response bias

The most worrisome problem that arises when a survey is made voluntary is that the households who choose to respond to that survey may differ significantly from those who refuse to do so. For example, if those carpenters with relatively high incomes are more likely to respond to the NHS than are those with low incomes, the average incomes reported by the NHS will be biased upwards.

Statistics Canada could not control, ex ante, for the possibility that this would happen. However, they were able, ex post, to investigate whether the respondents to the NHS were representative of the overall groups from which they were drawn – that is, they were able to determine whether the respondents “looked” different from the average.

To make this determination, Statistics Canada was assisted by the fact that they had a considerable amount of information about the respondents to the NHS before those individuals answered the NHS survey. Most importantly, they also had their responses to the short questions on the Census that are mandatory for all Canadians. In addition, they were also able to link the NHS respondents to those individuals’ tax files, immigrant landing data, and the Indian Register.

Using sophisticated statistical techniques they were able to determine that the average respondent to the NHS had very similar characteristics to the average Canadian with respect to age, sex, language, area of residence, income tax, immigration status, and aboriginal status. This finding leads Statistics Canada to conclude that the NHS respondents were, in most cases, representative of the larger population from which they were drawn. And when Statistics Canada was unable to conclude that the individuals who replied to a specific sub-class of questions were representative of the population, the resulting data were not released, or they were released with an accompanying cautionary note.

Summary

To summarise: Although the long-form portion of the 2011 Census was made voluntary, there is sound reason to believe that the data that are of greatest relevance to the calculation of lost earnings can be relied upon.

  1. The information in this article is drawn from a blog written by Wayne R. Smith, Chief Statistician of Canada, entitled “The 2011 National Household Survey – the complete statistical story,” June 4, 2015. This blog can be found at: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/blog-blogue/cs-sc/2011NHSstory.

 

Christopher Bruce is the President of Economica and a Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary. He is also the author of Assessment of Personal Injury Damages (Butterworths, 2004).

The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on the Educational Attainment and Adult Earnings of Canadian Women

Posted on By economica

The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on the by Christopher J. Bruce, Ph.D. & Daniel V. Gordon, Ph.D.

This article first appeared in the autumn 2007 issue of the Expert Witness.

Introduction

One of the most complex issues facing the courts in any sexual abuse case is the determination of the impact that the harm has had on the plaintiff’s earning capacity. Not only is very little statistical evidence available on this issue, but the data that do exist have often proved to be unreliable.

Recently, this lack of a reputable source has been resolved with the publication of a Statistics Canada survey in which a representative sample of Canadians was asked about their experiences of victimization. From this survey, we were able to obtain information about a large set of (adult) women who had suffered sexual abuse as children.

The purpose of this paper is to report our findings concerning the consequences of that abuse on the educational attainment and earnings of the victims. Our surprising result is that, among most such victims, abuse does not have a statistically significant effect on adult education and earnings. Furthermore, in the only group for which abuse
was found to have a significant effect – women who were first abused between the ages of seven and thirteen
– education and income were higher than among women who had not been abused.

The remainder of the paper is divided into three sections: a review of the existing literature; the development of an economic model concerning the effect of abuse; and a summary of our statistical findings.

Existing Literature

The academic literature concerning the effects of childhood sexual abuse is composed of two streams. In the first, researchers have attempted to develop theories of childhood social-psychological development that can be used to understand the pathways by which abuse affects its victims. In the second, researchers have used statistical tests to identify correlations between abuse and its predicted outcomes, such as depression, alcoholism, and school completion rates.

Theoretical

Many theories concerning the impact of sexual abuse are founded on the ‘core-symptom’ model, in which a
core problem or event is presumed to have led to one or more symptoms. The most common of these models characterize sexual abuse as a trauma, leading researchers to predict that abuse will result in post traumatic stress disorder.

An alternative interpretation suggests that, rather than
having a single effect, sexual abuse might produce multifaceted effects. Finkelhor and Browne (1985), for example, argued that sexual abuse had four primary effects: traumatic sexualization, stigmatization (i.e. low esteem and self-destructive behaviour), betrayal, and powerlessness.

A third approach, ‘developmental models,’ proposes that sexual abuse may affect victims by interfering with development in areas such as social- and self-functioning. In this view, therefore, the age at which the child is abused may be a critical determinant of the long-term effects of that abuse. For example, Celano (1992) suggested that the impact of sexual abuse may differ among Piaget’s three stages of childhood moral development (Piaget, 1965): preschool (ages 0-6), latency (7-13), and adolescence (14-19). She hypothesised that whereas preschoolers may not recognise that abuse is morally reprehensible, and adolescents may consider their moral culpability to be ameliorated by failure to provide informed consent, children in the latency period may consider themselves (at least in part) to be responsible for many of the types of abuse. Accordingly, she predicts that abuse will be most harmful if it occurs in the latency period.

Statistical

Statistical studies can roughly be divided among those that investigate the effect of sexual abuse on: psychological factors, (such as depression, self-esteem, and sexuality); social outcomes, (such as alcoholism and delinquency); and economic outcomes, (specifically, schooling and adult income).

This literature is virtually unanimous in its finding that childhood sexual abuse has statistically significant effects on the victim’s psychological well-being. The outcomes that are most commonly found include: low self-esteem, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, affective and personality disorders, and anti-social behaviour.

The sociological literature has provided evidence concerning the effect that abuse has on criminal activity. Studies that aggregate across a number of different types of childhood abuse
– neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse, for example
– commonly find that criminal activity is correlated with
this aggregate; although some find no statistically significant correlation. Importantly, however, when ‘abuse’ is separated into its components, it is only ‘neglect’ that is found to be correlated with criminal activity. Neither physical nor sexual abuse appears to be a significant determinant in this formulation.

Very mixed results have been obtained when researchers investigate the impact of abuse on schooling and income. Slade and Wissow, (2006) found that individuals who had been maltreated as children had lower high school GPAs than the control group, but no greater problems with teachers, with completion of homework, or with school absences. And some studies have found evidence that victims of childhood sexual abuse performed better in school than those who had not been abused (e.g. Eckenrode, et al. 1993 and Buckle, et al. 2005).

Economic Model

In our model, we assume that individuals divide their time among three activities: solitary leisure activities, such as reading, watching television, and playing video games; social leisure activities, such as team sports, club memberships, and interacting with friends; and “market” activities, such as investing in education and working in the labour market. The value of each activity increases as additional time and effort is devoted to it. And the “cost” of time spent in any one activity is the value that is foregone from the other activities (the “opportunity cost” concept so familiar to economics students).

We hypothesize that the effect of sexual abuse is to reduce the benefits that individuals obtain from each of the three activities. Normally, one would expect that this would lead to a reduction in each of them. However, assume that the negative effect on the time and effort devoted to two of the activities was greater than it was on the remaining one. In that case, it is possible that the victim might “substitute” away from the more seriously-affected activities towards the less-seriously affected one. As a result, the latter might even increase.

For example, if abuse had a much more significant (negative) impact on the individual’s ability to socialize than on
her ability to undertake schoolwork or to compete in the labour market, abuse might lead to a lesser reduction in the latter activities than expected, and could even lead to an increase in those activities. In common parlance, the individual might be said to have compensated for the harm to her socialization skills by ‘throwing herself’ into academic and work-related activities. In such a case, abused individuals might be observed to complete more years of education than the non-abused, and might earn higher incomes; but this would come at the expense of a significant withdrawal from normal social activities. We propose to test for this effect in the analysis reported in the next section.

Statistical Estimates

We obtained information concerning 6,528 adult Canadian
women, (drawn from the 1999 General Social Survey), of whom 607 reported that they had been sexually abused as children. Using the data from this survey, we conducted two statistical tests.

In the first of these, we estimated the effect of a series
of variables on educational achievement. The variables that are usually found to be important – such as parents’ education, individual’s place of birth, and whether the individual belonged to a “visible minority” – all proved
to be significant in our data. In addition, we found that if the individual had first been sexually abused between the ages of seven and thirteen, she obtained more education than did individuals who had not been abused or who had first been abused before seven or after thirteen.

In our second test, we estimated the effect of a number of background variables on adult earnings. As expected, we found that variables such as the individual’s education and whether she belonged to a visible minority had significant effects on income. And, again, we found that individuals who had been abused between the ages of seven and thirteen had statistically higher levels of income than did those who had not been abused or who had first been abused before seven or after thirteen. Importantly, this effect is in addition to the increase in income that would have arisen from the effect of abuse on education.

To summarise, we found: first, that abuse before the age of seven or after the age of thirteen had no statistically discernable effect on either the victim’s education or her adult income. Second, abuse between the ages of seven and thirteen increased average educational levels and increased average incomes, both directly and indirectly (through the effect on education).

Conclusion

We have found that, on average, sexual abuse is not associated with lower educational levels or lower adult incomes among victims. This does not mean that all victims have higher income levels than those who have not been victimised: some victims will be above-average and some below. When the court is dealing with a particular plaintiff, it should always rely on factors that are specific to that individual. Nevertheless, our results suggest that it cannot be concluded, without such specific information, that the individual’s adult income will be adversely affected by sexual abuse.

References

Buckle, S., S. Lancaster, M. Powell, and D. Higgins (2005) “The Relationship Between Child Sexual Abuse and Academic Achievement in a Sample of Adolescent Psychiatric Inpatients,” 29 Child Abuse and Neglect, 1031-1047.

Celano, M. (1992) “A Developmental Model of Victims’ Internal Attributions of Responsibility for Sexual Abuse,” 7 Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 57-69.

Eckenrode, J., M. Laird, and J. Doris (1993) “School Performance and Disciplinary Problems Among Abused and Neglected Children,” 29 Developmental Psychology,
53-62.

Finkelhor, D., and A. Browne (1985) “The Traumatic Impact of Child Sexual Abuse: A Conceptualization,” 55 American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 530-541.

Piaget, J. (1965) The Moral Judgement of the Child, (New York: Free Press).

Slade, E., and L. Wissow (2006) “The Influence of Childhood Maltreatment on Adolescents’ Academic Performance,”
Economics of Education Review, (in press).

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Christopher Bruce is the President of Economica and a Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary. He is also the author of Assessment of Personal Injury Damages (Butterworths, 2004).

Daniel V. Gordon, Ph.D., is a professor of economics at the University of Calgary, where he specialises in the use of statistics for economic analysis.

Increased Earnings After Injury

Posted on By economica

by Michael Behr

This article was originally published in the autumn 1999 issue of the Expert Witness.

Has an injured person sustained a loss if the injury forces a change in occupation which produces higher income? Definitely. Any suggestion that injury is beneficial contradicts fundamental economic principles.

Resources

Economics allocates resources to competing uses which forces choice. The possession of a higher quantity and quality of resources is the power to realize more valuable choices. Injury, virtually by definition, is a reduction in the quantity or quality of resources possessed by the injured party. Therefore, injury constitutes economic loss.

Cross Section versus Time Series

Sleight of intellect puts damages into time series and concludes that higher post-injury income shows no loss. But the issue in damages is not the time series difference between yesterday without injury versus today with injury. Rather, damages are the cross sectional difference between today without injury and today with injury. Time series violates the required ceteris paribus conditions because the passage of time incorporates many changes in addition to the injury itself, most notably of course, the occupational change producing the higher income.

The naïve are seduced by the replacement of cross section with time series because life is lived in time series, whereas the cross section requires abstraction from experience to comprehend the alternative condition after injury but without the injury. The skilled tortfeasor defendant can be expected to attempt to substitute time series for the cross section if it leads to a lower or negative loss conclusion because of higher post-injury income. That defendant is emboldened by the realization that time series will probably have intuitive appeal to a jury. Plaintiff must therefore be vigilant and unyielding in preserving the cross section. If not, the defendant making an invalid argument to an economically naïve jury has an excellent chance of producing a perverse verdict to the detriment of plaintiff. Perverse verdicts are inconsistent with market values and therefore also reduce the general welfare of society.

Information

The thoughtful may attempt to rebut the above, arguing that information is central to the allocation of resources to their most valuable ends, citing the role of information as a condition of a competitive economic system. Inasmuch as it was the injury that “informed” plaintiff of the higher income opportunity, it is argued the damages should be credited with the higher income itself. This argument contradicts fundamentals underlying a market economic system in a society valuing individual liberty.

Noneconomic Values

The higher income opportunity undoubtedly existed prior to
the injury, but may have been rejected for noneconomic reasons. The disutility of the higher income employment may exceed the value of the higher income itself in the eyes of plaintiff. If so, forcing plaintiff to credit the damage with the higher income is to force plaintiff to substitute uncompensated noneconomic loss for what would otherwise be compensated economic loss.

Antisocial Incentives

Accepting the argument for crediting the damage with the higher income leads to the conclusion that I should waken my sleepy neighbor by disabling him to force him to replace his physical occupation with more sedentary higher employment. Further, he should pay me for this valuable service. This absurdity is a direct incentive to destroy resources, which in a world of resources insufficient to satisfy all competing ends is inimical to the interests of society.

Collateral Source

The economic essence of collateral source is compensation for injury occasioned by the injury itself. Generally, defendant is barred from a credit against liability for damage from collateral sources on the grounds that the social interest is served by not allowing a tortfeasor to escape the cost of his acts. This position is consistent with market economics where parties bear the cost of their actions in exchange for reaping the benefits. Although the discovery of a higher income occupation occasioned by an injury is not included as a collateral source in the law, its economic character is that of collateral source. The tortfeasor may not benefit from it as a matter of economics-and ideally in the law as well for whatever reason.

Mitigation

At some point collateral source comes into tension with the economically valid legal requirement that plaintiff must make the best of it under the circumstances. The market expects resources to find their way to their highest and best uses, including those held by injured plaintiff. This works to the benefit of tortfeasor and may include some obligation by plaintiff to move to a more suitable post-injury occupation which may turn out to be higher paying. How much disruption of plaintiff’s life to accommodate his/her injury is a reasonable obligation of plaintiff? Is he/she required to move to another planet, so to speak, to realize the higher income?

The consequence of this tension is that the damage will be bounded by the cross sectional differences between pre-and post-injury income in the pre and post-injury occupations. Inasmuch as the adequacy of plaintiff’s mitigation is inevitably directly or indirectly a jury question, the economist may be well advised to provide a damage conclusion based on the effect of the injury on both the pre-injury earning capacity in cross section and on the higher post-injury earning capacity in cross section. The injury’s hindrance of performance in the higher income employment may actually be greater than its hindrance of the pre-injury occupation in cross section. An expert vocational opinion may be a foundational requirement for each occupation.

If there are retraining or other costs to plaintiff necessary to realize the higher post-injury income, the value of the higher income must, of course, be net of those costs.

Conclusion: The destructiveness of an injury establishes the fact of an economic loss irrespective of pre and post-injury incomes or earning capacity. Plaintiff’s competitive position, and therefore his range of choice in the market is reduced by the injury, legal prohibitions of discrimination against the disabled notwithstanding. The forensic economist’s damage conclusion is, at its core, the value of that reduced range of choice.

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Michael Behr is a forensic economist located in Northfield, Minnesota. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 1969 to 1983 he was Associate Professor and Professor of Business and Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Superior teaching most undergraduate economics courses and statistics. Tired of University meetings, memos and the same old track by 1983, he resigned his University position for the greater fun and profit of full-time self-employment as a forensic economics sole practitioner. He has been involved in about 1,300 cases, about half of them small business matters with the majority of those farms and other agricultural matters. He may be reached at P. O. Box 430, 813 N. Linden St., Northfield, MN 55057. Phone 507-663-7124. Fax 507-663-1735. mbehr@mrb.com.

Injured, Yet Better Off?

Posted on By economica

by Scott Beesley

This article was originally published in the summer 1999 issue of the Expert Witness.

We occasionally encounter the claim that a plaintiff is better off financially than before the accident, or at least will be better off in the future. The evidence for this is usually that they are now earning more than they did at the time of the accident. Therefore how can there be any loss? This is not really very hard to respond to, and there are several reasons why there may still be a modest, or very substantial, loss of future income.

In an article in the March 1999 Barrister, Mr. Cameron J. Ashmore of Russell & Company provided a discussion of this issue, within a broader analysis of possible approaches to future loss assessment. Mr. Ashmore listed four reasons why a person who was apparently earning more might still have a loss of future income: early retirement, increased risk of unemployment, reduced future wage growth, and the prospect of time missed from work over the years. All of these are certainly legitimate concerns, and we commonly address them in our work. They all require, however, subjective judgments regarding the future effects of injury, which are difficult even for vocational experts to assess. If vocational opinions are not provided, or if the plaintiff’s outlook is less than clear, then we commonly consider a range of alternatives
(i.e. various growth, contingency and retirement assumptions). The court can then choose the figures it finds most reasonable in the pre- and post-accident cases, and the loss follows from that. If the court, for example, finds that all of these effects are fairly minimal, then indeed a small future loss is all that will result.

There is another issue to consider in these cases, and that
is wage growth between the date of the accident and the date of the evaluation. I would suggest that in some cases, a future loss is denied on the basis of faulty logic, in that
post-accident wage growth in that period is accepted as a fact, while pre-accident wage growth is implicitly or explicitly not considered. We refer now to wage growth in the general sense of any career progression, either incremental or sudden (such as when improved educational standing leads to a quick increase in income). It should be quite obvious that, no matter how minimal the injury, a plaintiff is never more capable of vocational progress after an injury than before, yet that is commonly implied or suggested outright.

Consider the example of an average male college graduate, injured at the age of 27, when he was earning $32,000. Five years later, at age 32, he is earning $33,000. First, we note that inflation alone applied to the older figure would probably predict an income of roughly $34,500, so even with just that adjustment there is an immediate loss. Much more important is the fact that 1996 Census data would predict that over those 5 years, the plaintiff’s income would have grown by approximately 22.56 percent, plus inflation. Assuming cumulative inflation of 8 percent over the five years, the total estimated increase in pre-accident income is 32.36 percent, and the value of pre-accident income at age 32 is
$42,355. The loss from age 32 to 33 is seen to be approximately
$9,355, and of course this loss may continue through to retirement. (In many cases the annual loss will decrease over time, simply because an average income curve starts with higher growth and levels off, such that a plaintiff who is five years behind, for example, will eventually get closer to their pre-accident level.)

I realize that the above example seems quite trivial, but we have repeatedly seen analyses in which post-accident figures are compared to pre-accident income from several years before, and inflation, or pre-accident wage growth, or both, are ignored. While there is certainly room for argument regarding how much more pre-accident wage growth a plaintiff might have enjoyed, it can never be considered logical to say that they will enjoy better prospects and wage growth after being injured. It is also flatly wrong to compare a post-accident figure to a pre-accident figure from several years before, without adjusting for inflation.

When a high school graduate plaintiff, in another example, retrains 4 years after the accident, and obtains a diploma in technology, their income could easily be far greater than before the accident. I would suggest that it is generally wrong to suggest that there is no future loss. I would further suggest that one fair way to assess the loss is to assume that the plaintiff would have completed the same given diploma one to three years sooner, in the absence of the accident. The loss then is the gap between pre- and post-accident income curves, which, as noted above, could almost vanish when growth slows in the later years of the person’s career. If the plaintiff had had no plans to enter such training until the accident occurred, that should not prevent the use of the method: clearly he/she had the potential to enter some form of training, and any such upgrade would have resulted in increased income. In addition to the loss resulting from a lag of some years, it is also possible that some of the four factors Mr. Ashmore listed will also be found to apply, and a more substantial loss might result.

In the absence of evidence regarding the plaintiff’s intentions prior to the accident, it is reasonable, I would argue, to assume that the plaintiff would have followed the same career path had the accident not occured as he/she has been observed to follow after the accident. If the new field is about as lucrative as any they could have entered, without injury, then there is probably no loss beyond what is due to the time lag and, possibly, some increased contingency risk. The loss is limited to the delay and probably some increased contingency risk. Conversely, the defense should not be able to claim that, because of the accident, the plaintiff has entered a new and better-paying field. To do so is, I repeat, to deny that the given path was possible before the injury, which makes little sense.

Two other examples merit brief mention. The first concerns women who are becoming more involved in work, after their children reach some particular stage (e.g. into grade 1). In such cases we might see a woman who had had very minimal income enjoy significant increases, even after an accident. This is occurring because they can now use their earlier training, or commit to full-time work, or move, or simply devote time to retraining and adding to their employability. It is again false to compare the income such a woman is now earning to what they were earning perhaps 6 years ago, yet this has been done at times. Any correct pre-accident scenario must be an answer to the question “What career path would have been open to Ms. Plaintiff, in the absence of the accident, and considering that her children are older and she can devote more time and energy to work?” One cannot use a pre-accident income level from the past, as if, in the absence of the accident, the children would never have grown up!

A final example is similar in principle to the case of the
“returning mother.” I have handled a fatal case in which pre-accident business income was assessed using the average of several years prior to the accident. As it happened, these were very poor years for the type of business in question, with returns well below the historical average. At about the same time as the accident, the business climate improved dramatically, producing higher returns for the surviving spouse, who was using a family member to replace some of the deceased’s labour. The opposing expert used income from the poor, before accident years to estimate pre-accident income, and an average in the later good years to define post-accident income. The plaintiff was said to be better off, before accounting for the (inadequate) wage paid to the family member to replace the deceased’s labour. After that was subtracted, the plaintiff was said to have suffered only a very slight loss. Note that this entire treatment is fatally flawed, as it assumes that the deceased would never have benefited from the improved business climate. Alternatively, it amounts to claiming that the accident
caused that improved business climate, which seems even more indefensible.

Any loss assessment should properly address the financial effects of changes which are due to the accident, and those alone. Other unrelated changes must be applied in both the pre- and post-accident analyses. Failure to compare apples to apples is an objective wrong, not simply a point of legitimate subjective dispute, like many of the assumptions made in most loss of income reports.

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Scott Beesley is a consultant with Economica and has a Master of Arts degree (in economics) from the University of British Columbia.