Do Stricter Penalties or Media Publicity Reduce Alcohol Consumption By Drivers?

Anindya Sen ()

No 2005, Working Papers from University of Waterloo, Department of Economics

Abstract: A decline in drinking and driving could be due to stricter penalties as well as enhanced media publicity, which increases public knowledge of drinking and driving laws. However, most research fails to control for the effects of increased media coverage. Employing a unique data set consisting of the blood alcohol content (BAC) levels of fatally injured drivers in Canada from 1982 to 1992, I find that both stricter penalties and an increase in the number of newspaper articles related to drinking and driving are significantly correlated with reduced alcohol consumption. Further, omitting proxies for media coverage results in biased coefficient estimates of the efficacy of stricter penalties. These results suggest that the enactment of sterner punishment must be supplemented with public education programs.

Date: 2002-01, Revised 2002-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Stricter Penalties or Media Publicity Reduce Alcohol Consumption by Drivers? (2005)
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:wat:wpaper:02005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Waterloo, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sherri Anne Arsenault ().