Estimating the Effect of Alcohol on Driver Risk Using Only Fatal Accident Statistics

Steven Levitt and Jack Porter

No 6944, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Measuring the relative likelihood of fatal crash involvement for different types of drivers would seem to require information on both the number of fatal crashes by driver type and the fraction of drivers on the road falling into each category. In this paper, however, we present a methodology for measuring fatal crash likelihood that relies solely on fatal crash data. The key to our identification strategy is the hidden richness inherent to two-car crashes. Crashes involving two drinking drivers are proportional to the square of the number of drinking drivers on the road; crashes with one drinking and one sober driver increase linearly in the number of drinking drivers. Imposing a limited set of assumptions (e.g. independence across crashes, equal mixing on the roads), we are able to estimate both the likelihood of causing a fatal crash and the fraction of drivers of each type on the road. Our estimates suggest that drivers with alcohol in their blood are at least eight times more likely to cause a fatal crash; legally drunk drivers pose a risk at least 15 times greater than sober drivers. Males, young drivers, and drivers with bad past driving records are all more dangerous, but the impact of these other factors is far less than that of alcohol.

JEL-codes: C13 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: PE LE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6944.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:6944

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6944

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 ().