 An extra hour wasted? Bar closing hours and traffic accidents in NorwayColin Green () and Lana Krehic Health Economics, 2022, vol. 31, issue 8, 1752-1769 Abstract: Driving under the influence of alcohol is a major cause of fatalities worldwide. There have been a range of legislative and policy interventions aiming to address this. Bar closing hours is one policy with clear implications for drink driving. Existing evidence, largely drawn from one‐off policy changes in urban settings, reports mixed evidence that is difficult to generalize. We return to this issue using a setting, Norway, that is advantageous due to large temporal and regional variation in closing times, frequent changes, and a lack of confounding policy changes. We demonstrate an average zero effect of closing hours on traffic accidents that masks large variations in effects: in terms of population density; accident severity; and direction of change in closing hours. Extensions in closing hours in populous municipalities decrease accidents, whereas the opposite is true for rural municipalities. Our findings suggest that estimates from single policy changes may be difficult to generalize, while demonstrating that closing hours can generate large effects on traffic accidents. Date: 2022 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:31:y:2022:i:8:p:1752-1769 Access Statistics for this article Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.