Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
3-2018
Abstract
In 2003, China enacted the Road Traffic Safety Law in an attempt to promote traffic safety.We employ a difference-in-differences strategy on province level data, where fire accidentsare used as a control group for road accidents, to estimate the effects of the law on road accidents and casualties. Our findings suggest that while the law was successful in decreasing thenumber of accidents and casualties, the ratio of deaths to accidents and injuries to accidentsincreased. Exploring the potential channels, we find no evidence that “hit-and-kill” incentives,that is, incentives for motorists to kill the pedestrians that they hit due to China’s peculiar personal injury compensation rules, drive the increase in death to accident ratio. We show thatan increase in the severity of accidents could, in fact, be consistent with a model where allmotorists drive more carefully after the reform, but have heterogeneous responses such thatthe decrease in accident probability is larger for safer than for riskier drivers.
Keywords
Road safety regulations, Traffic accidents, Accident deadliness
Discipline
Behavioral Economics | Transportation Law
Research Areas
Applied Microeconomics
First Page
1
Last Page
55
Citation
HO, Christine and ANEY, Madhav S..
Deadlier road Accidents? Traffic safety regulations and heterogeneous motorists’ behavior. (2018). 1-55.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2227
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.