USSeatBelts: 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")

Arguments

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").

Source

Online complements to Stock and Watson (2007). http://wps.aw.com/aw_stock_ie_2/

Details

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

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.

Examples

Run this code

data("USSeatBelts")
summary(USSeatBelts)

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

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