Deterring Drunk Driving Fatalities: An Economics of Crime Perspective

Econometric studies of public policies that might deter driving-under-the-influence (DUI) offenses generally adopt, either explicitly or implicitly, the basic framework provided in Becker’s (1968) expected utility model of criminal behavior. The literature has generally not provided consistent evidence of any particular source of direct deterrence due to the probability and/or severity of punishment for DUI, however. This may reflect the fact that only indirect DUI deterrence through alcohol control policies such as beer taxes and drinking age is consistently considered in these studies. Forced to select among many policy variables to keep regressions manageable, researchers have virtually always controlled for beer taxes and drinking-age laws in reduced-form models, but the selection of other variables (laws establishing sanctions for DUI, law enforcement efforts and laws that facilitate this effort, the potential for civil action against drivers or against bar owners who sell to drunk drivers, determinants of liquor price and availability, attitudes toward drinking, etc.) has been much less consistent. Furthermore, because there is no direct measure of state-level DUI offenses, some proxy must be used as a dependent variable (generally, some measure of traffic fatalities is employed) in studies using state-level data, and the proxy or proxies chosen can also vary from study to study (e.g., total fatalities, night-time fatalities, single-occupant fatalities, and fatalities involving young drivers). Thus, one study may find some specific laws or policies to be effective, but those same variables may have insignificant coefficients in another study while other variables seem significant, implying that no robust results can be found.