For a person working with applied welfare economics and environmental economics, cost-benefit analysis plays a central role. In particular, much effort and time is devoted to examining the properties of measures which involve monetary benefits and improving existing techniques for the empirical estimation of benefits expressed in monetary units. When shifting one's interest and orientation towards health economics, it is somewhat surprising to find that most health economists work with other benefits measures such as quality-adjusted life-years (qalys) and healthy-years equivalents (hyes). There also seems to be no book available which defines and examines in detail the properties of money measures of changes in health risks and surveys the empirical methods which can be used to assess the economic value of such changes. The books by Jones-Lee (1976, 1989) and Viscusi (1992), though excellent, do not have this orientation. Books on environmental economics, for example Braden and Kolstad (1991), Freeman (1979) and Johansson (1987, 1993), typically devote no more than one or two chapters to (environmental) health risks. For this reason, and since economic evaluations of health care expenditures will come to play an important role in those economies where there is a growing awareness of the fact that resources are limited and hence must be allocated in a reasonable way between different and competing needs, I decided to write such a book.