Effects of Mandatory Seat Belt Laws in the US

Description

Balanced panel data for the years 1983–1997 from 50 US States, plus the District of Columbia, for assessing traffic fatalities and seat belt usage.

Usage

data("USSeatBelts")

Format

A data frame containing 765 observations on 12 variables.

state

factor indicating US state (abbreviation).

year

factor indicating year.

miles

millions of traffic miles per year.

fatalities

number of fatalities per million of traffic miles (absolute frequencies of fatalities = fatalities times miles).

seatbelt

seat belt usage rate, as self-reported by state population surveyed.

speed65

factor. Is there a 65 mile per hour speed limit?

speed70

factor. Is there a 70 (or higher) mile per hour speed limit?

drinkage

factor. Is there a minimum drinking age of 21 years?

alcohol

factor. Is there a maximum of 0.08 blood alcohol content?

income

median per capita income (in current US dollar).

age

mean age.

enforce

factor indicating seat belt law enforcement ("no", "primary", "secondary").

Details

Some data series from Cohen and Einav (2003) have not been included in the data frame.

Source

Online complements to Stock and Watson (2007).

References

Cohen, A., and Einav, L. (2003). The Effects of Mandatory Seat Belt Laws on Driving Behavior and Traffic Fatalities. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 85, 828–843

Stock, J.H. and Watson, M.W. (2007). Introduction to Econometrics, 2nd ed. Boston: Addison Wesley.

See Also

StockWatson2007

Examples

data("USSeatBelts")
summary(USSeatBelts)

library("lattice")
xyplot(fatalities ~ as.numeric(as.character(year)) | state, data = USSeatBelts, type = "l")