Lonely Highways: The Role of Social Capital in Rural Traffic Safety

Matthew Nagler and Nicholas J Ward
Additional contact information
Nicholas J Ward: Center for Health and Safety Culture, Western Transportation Institute, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717 -4250, USA

Eastern Economic Journal, 2016, vol. 42, issue 1, 135-156

Abstract: Pursuant to earlier findings that social capital reduces traffic fatality risks, we explore here whether the same protective effects of social capital exist on rural roads as urban roads and what might explain differential effects. Our estimation of simultaneous equation systems of complementary traffic incident types on a panel of US states reveals a significantly lower protective effect on rural roads. Potentially relevant differentials in crash-type/context exposure do not mediate this outcome. Rather it appears the relative prevalence of certain risk behaviors (e.g., speeding) skew rural environments toward crash situations where the critical safety factors are orthogonal to social capital influence.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v42/n1/pdf/eej201460a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v42/n1/full/eej201460a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
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:pal:easeco:v:42:y:2016:i:1:p:135-156

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/41302

Access Statistics for this article

Eastern Economic Journal is currently edited by Allan Zebedee and Cynthia Bansak

More articles in Eastern Economic Journal from Palgrave Macmillan, Eastern Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().