Policy Ineffectiveness or Offsetting Behavior? An Analysis of Vehicle Safety Inspections

Marc Poitras and Daniel Sutter

Southern Economic Journal, 2002, vol. 68, issue 4, 922-934

Abstract: Over 60 million registered motor vehicles in 20 states are subject to mandatory periodic safety inspection. The effect of safety inspection on roadway casualties has been estimated by several studies, with mixed results. We present a unique test of inspection effectiveness by analyzing the policy's impact on old cars in use and on repair industry revenue. Our results indicate that inspection has no significant impact on old cars or repair industry revenue, which implies that inspection does not improve the mechanical condition of vehicles. Unlike studies that examine casualties, our tests allow us to distinguish between policy ineffectiveness and Peltzman‐type offsetting behavior as sources of inspection failure.

Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2325-8012.2002.tb00466.x

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:wly:soecon:v:68:y:2002:i:4:p:922-934

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Southern Economic Journal from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().