Road accidents: unexpected costs of stock market movements

Jane Fry and Lisa Farrell

Oxford Economic Papers, 2023, vol. 75, issue 1, 233-255

Abstract: Recent interest has grown in the link between stock market returns and health conditions. We extend this literature to road accidents as changes in returns may affect anxiety and stress, leading to driver fatigue and distraction, resulting in road accidents. Using Stats19 administrative data on accidents, we investigate the relationship between FTSE100 returns and accidents in British regions from 2008 to 2019. Accidents respond positively to decreases and increases in returns with effects up to 1.2%. Daily returns can be large, having substantial effect on accidents when returns are large. Compared with US results, we find no effects for fatal accidents. This could result from the UK’s very low fraction of fatalities and differences in road infrastructure, speed, and congestion. Unanticipated changes in returns represent an exogenous shock to individuals which may causally affect driving behaviour, and this is important to road safety stakeholders and for health promotion and policy.

JEL-codes: D91 G10 I12 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpac016 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:75:y:2023:i:1:p:233-255.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Economic Papers is currently edited by James Forder and Francis J. Teal

More articles in Oxford Economic Papers from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().