EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Alcohol Control Policies and Motor Vehicle Fatalities

Frank Chaloupka, Henry Saffer () and Michael Grossman

No 3831, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to estimate the effects of drunk driving deterrents and other alcohol related policies on drunk driving. The data set employed is an annual time-series of state cross-sections for the 48 contiguous states of the U.S. from 1982 through 1988. Total and alterative alcohol involved motor vehicle fatality rates, for the general population and for 18 to 20 year olds, are used as measures of drunk driving. The results indicate that the moat effective policies are increased beer taxes and mandatory administrative license actions. Maintaining the beer tax at its real 1951 value would have reduced fatalities by 11.5 percent annually, on average, during the sample period. A mandatory administrative license sanction of one year would have reduced fatalities by 9 percent. The next most effective policies are a 21 year old legal drinking age, preliminary breath test and dram shop laws and relatively large mandatory fines. These policies each reduce total fatalities by about 5 to 6 percent. No plea bargaining provisions and mandatory license sanctions upon conviction are also found to have some deterrent effect. Other drunk driving laws tested include mandatory jail sentences and community service options, illegal per se laws, and open container laws. None of these were found to have a deterrent effect on drunk driving.

Date: 1991-09
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Published as Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. XXII, pp. 161-186 (January 1993).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w3831.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Alcohol-Control Policies and Motor-Vehicle Fatalities (1993) Downloads
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:nbr:nberwo:3831

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w3831

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3831