Drunk driving and social control policies: Econometric analysis of policy effectivenes

This study investigates the effects of major anti-drunk driving policies on drunk driving fatality reduction. Policies investigated include arrests of drunk drivers, price controls of three alcoholic beverages, and ten regulatory legislation: administrative license suspension laws, mandatory jail sentences for first drunk driving offenses, illegal per se laws, preliminary breath test laws, open container laws, dramshop laws, anti-plea bargaining laws, sobriety checkpoint laws, mandatory safety belt use laws, and minimum drinking age at twenty-one. In addition, this study considers demography of drivers, amount of travel, characteristics of roadways and vehicles, and socioeconomic conditions in order to control for the effects of those factors.;Cross-sectional time-series data for the forty-eight contiguous states from 1982 to 1994 are analyzed to examine whether control policies are effective in reducing drunk driving fatalities, and whether policy effects vary across different roadways: Interstate highways vs. non-Interstate highways, rural highways vs. urban highways.;Results show that a ten percent increase in arrested drunk drivers reduces by approximately one percent the number of drunk driving fatalities on urban non-Interstate highways. The enactment of administrative license suspension laws reduces by approximately nine percent the number of drunk driving fatalities.;Results also show that using nonstationary time-series level data creates the possibility of making spurious inferences about policy effectiveness: real prices of beer and liquor show statistical significance at ten percent levels in the level data series analyses, but they are not significant in the analyses of differenced data series. The same results are obtained regarding open container laws and mandatory jail sentences for first drunk driving offenses.;Separate investigations of each four roadway-specific drunk driving fatalities show that policy effects differ across different roadways. Administrative license suspension laws are effective in reducing drunk driving fatalities on non-Interstate highways, but none of the policies examined here have effects to reduce fatalities on Interstate highways. No drunk driving control policies significantly reduce drunk driving fatalities on rural non-Interstate highways. However, administrative license suspension laws and arrests for drunk driving are effective in reducing drunk driving fatalities on urban non-Interstate highways.