Stay or Flee? Probability versus Severity of Punishment in Hit-And-Run Accidents

Stefano Castriota () and Mirco Tonin
Additional contact information
Stefano Castriota: University of Pisa

No 12693, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The empirical literature testing the economic theory of crime has extensively studied the relative importance of the probability and the severity of punishment with reference to planned criminal activities. There are, however, also unplanned crimes and in this paper we focus on a very serious and widespread one, hit-and-run road accidents. In fact, it is not only unplanned, but also largely committed by citizens without criminal records and the decision whether to stay or run must be taken within a few seconds. Using Italian data for the period 1996-2016, we rely on daylight as an exogenous source of variation affecting the probability of apprehension and find that the likelihood of hit-and-run conditional on an accident taking place increases by around 20% with darkness. Relying on two legislative reforms which increased the penalties in case of hit-and-run, we find no significant effect on drivers' behavior. Our results show that criminal activities in unplanned circumstances and under intense time pressure and emotional distress are deterred more by the certainty rather than the severity of legal sanctions.

Keywords: punishment; hit-and-run; crime; road accidents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 K14 K42 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published as 'Stay or flee? Hit-and-run accidents, darkness and probability of punishment' in: European Journal of Law and Economics , 2023, 55, 117 - 144

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12693.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Stay or Flee? Probability versus Severity of Punishment in Hit-and-run Accidents (2019)
Working Paper: Stay or Flee? Probability Versus Severity of Punishment in Hit-And-Run Accidents (2019)
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:iza:izadps:dp12693

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().