Reducing traffic fatalities in the American States by upgrading seat belt use laws to primary enforcement

A key component of crime deterrence is the certainty of detection, but in 2005 seat belt laws in 27 states prohibited law enforcement officers from ticketing an observed violation unless the driver is stopped for another offense, which is referred to as secondary enforcement. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have upgraded from secondary to primary enforcement, which authorizes police to stop a motor vehicle if a driver or occupant covered by the law is observed not using a seat belt. To test the impact of seat belt enforcement provisions, cross‐sectional time series regressions are estimated for annual driver and occupant fatality rates in the American states from 1990 to 2002. Using several control variables for other traffic policies and state demographics, the results indicate primary enforcement is more effective in saving lives than secondary enforcement. Furthermore, upgrading to a primary law enhances the effectiveness of an existing state mandatory use law. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

U.S. Child Safety Seat Laws: Are they Effective,and Who Complies?

This paper assesses the effectiveness of child safety seat laws in the United States. Over the past 35 years, these laws have steadily increased mandatory child safety seat restraint ages. We exploit state‐year level variation in the age until which children are required to ride in child safety seats to estimate triple difference models using Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data from 1975 to 2011. Our findings show that increasing the age thresholds is effective in increasing the actual age of children in safety seats. Across the child‐age distribution, restraint rates increase by between 10 and 30 percentage points or by between 50 and 170 percent, in the long run. We also estimate the impact of the child safety seat laws on the likelihood that a child dies in a fatal accident. We find that the laws saved up to 39 children per year. Finally, we find that the laws primarily induce compliant parents to switch from traditional seatbelt use to child safety seat use, with only small effects among parents who do not restrain their children.     

The effects of tougher enforcement on the job prospects of recent Latin American immigrants

Attempts to enforce immigration laws in the U.S. interior have proliferated in recent years, yet the effects of these laws on immigrants are largely unknown. This paper examines whether increases in immigration‐related law enforcement since 2001 have adversely affected the labor market outcomes of low‐education male immigrants from Latin America, a group that comprises the bulk of undocumented workers in the U.S. The crackdown on the use of fraudulent Social Security numbers, increased requirements for government‐issued identification, and other changes associated with greater focus on national security likely lowered the demand for undocumented foreign‐born workers in the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Using Current Population Survey data and a difference‐in‐differences estimation technique, we find strong evidence of worse labor market outcomes among recent Latin American immigrants in the post‐9/11 period relative to natives and prior Latin American immigrants. The results indicate a decline in employment, hours worked, and earnings among recent male Latin American immigrants relative to similarly low‐skilled black and Hispanic natives and vis‐à‐vis Latin American immigrants who have been in the U.S. longer. Our findings are consistent with firms increasingly substituting legal workers for undocumented labor in the years following 9/11. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems

Compulsory voting laws have consistently been demonstrated to boost electoral participation. Despite the widespread presence of compulsory voting and the significant impact these laws appear to have on voting behavior, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to analyzing how mandatory voting alters the decision-making calculus of individual voters in these systems. Moreover, studies that investigate the influence of compulsory voting laws on electoral participation generally treat these policies monolithically, with scant attention to the nuances that differentiate mandatory voting laws across systems and to their consequences for voting rates. Analyses that explicitly and empirically examine the effects of penalties and enforcement are surprisingly rare. This study aims to fill that void by adapting rational choice models of participation in elections for compulsory voting systems. I find that the level of penalties countries impose for non-compliance and the degree of penalty enforcement impact turnout rates. Voters in mandatory voting systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when both meaningless.

Technical expertise and risk conflict: An institutional study of the British compulsory seat belt debate

Controversy and public conflict seem to be inevitable features of contemporary risk debates. In the face of such disputes, one common response has been to characterise disagreement as a disparity between expert analyses of ‘actual’ risk, and emotional ‘perceptions’ of hazard. This paper uses the example of the British policy debate over compulsory seat belt wear in order to argue that these characterisations are inaccurate and obstructive. Instead, an ‘institutional’ perspective on such issues is advocated - this perspective considers the effect of political and organisational factors in shaping the direction of public debate. The analysis here focuses particularly on expert disagreement over the likely effectiveness of seat belt laws - the debate over ‘risk compensation’ is reviewed both before and after the introduction of seat belt laws as an ‘experimental’ measure.     

Testing the School‐to‐Prison Pipeline

The School‐to‐Prison Pipeline is a social phenomenon where students become formally involved with the criminal justice system as a result of school policies that use law enforcement, rather than discipline, to address behavioral problems. A potentially important part of the School‐to‐Prison Pipeline is the use of sworn School Resource Officers (SROs), but there is little research on the causal effect of hiring these officers on school crime or arrests. Using credibly exogenous variation in the use of SROs generated by federal hiring grants specifically to place law enforcement in schools, I find evidence that law enforcement agencies learn about more crimes in schools upon receipt of a grant, and are more likely to make arrests for those crimes. This primarily affects children under the age of 15. However, I also find evidence that SROs increase school safety, and help law enforcement agencies make arrests for drug crimes occurring on and off school grounds.     

Assessing the Effects of Medical Marijuana Laws on Marijuana Use: The Devil is in the Details

This paper sheds light on previous inconsistencies identified in the literature regarding the relationship between medical marijuana laws (MMLs) and recreational marijuana use by closely examining the importance of policy dimensions (registration requirements, home cultivation, dispensaries) and the timing of when particular policy dimensions are enacted. Using data from our own legal analysis of state MMLs, we evaluate which features are associated with adult and youth recreational and heavy use by linking these policy variables to data from the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS) and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). We employ differences‐in‐differences techniques, controlling for state and year fixed effects, allowing us to exploit within‐state policy changes. We find that while simple dichotomous indicators of MML laws are not positively associated with marijuana use or abuse, such measures hide the positive influence legal dispensaries have on adult and youth use, particularly heavy use. Sensitivity analyses that help address issues of policy endogeneity and actual implementation of dispensaries support our main conclusion that not all MML laws are the same. Dimensions of these policies, in particular legal protection of dispensaries, can lead to greater recreational marijuana use and abuse among adults and those under the legal age of 21 relative to MMLs without this supply source.     

IMPROVING EARLY‐GRADE LITERACY IN EAST AFRICA: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM KENYA AND UGANDA

Primary school enrollments have increased rapidly in sub‐Saharan Africa, spurring concerns about low levels of learning. We analyze field experiments in Kenya and Uganda that assessed whether the Reading to Learn intervention, implemented by the Aga Khan Foundation in both countries, improved early‐grade literacy as measured by common assessments. We find that Ugandan literacy (in Lango) increased by 0.2 standard deviations. We find a smaller effect (0.08) on a Swahili literacy test in Kenya. We find no evidence that differential effects are explained by baseline differences across countries in student test scores, classroom attributes, or implementation fidelity. A plausible explanation that cannot be directly tested is differential effective exposure to the literacy treatment in the tested languages. Students in Kenya were tested in Swahili, which is not necessarily the main language of instruction in primary schools, despite official policy.     

Inequities in enforcement? Environmental justice and government performance

This paper examines whether state governments perform systematically less environmental enforcement of facilities in communities with higher minority and low‐income populations. Although this is an important claim made by environmental justice advocates, it has received little attention in the scholarly literature. Specifically, I analyze state regulatory enforcement of three U.S. pollution control laws—the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act—over the period 1985–2000. To test for disparities in enforcement, I estimate a series of count models and find strong evidence across each of the three environmental laws that states perform less enforcement in poor counties, but little evidence of race‐based inequities. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Politics,unemployment, and the enforcement of immigration law

Immigration control-related audits and their resulting sanctions are not solely determined by impartial enforcement of laws and regulations. They are also determined by the incentives faced by vote-maximizing politicians, agents acting on their behalf, and workers likely to compete with immigrants in the local labor market. In this paper, we use a unique data set to test the extent to which congressional oversight determines the bureaucratic immigration enforcement process. We examine the decisions made at each stage of enforcement from over 40,000 audits from 1990 to 2000. This includes analysis of (1) whether a firm is found in violation, (2) whether a fine is issued, (3) the size of the fine issued, and (4) how much of a dollar reduction fined employers were able to negotiate. We find that the number of audits conducted increases with local unemployment. We also find that a congressman’s party affiliation and its interaction with committee membership and party majority status, as well as firm size and local union membership, correlate to decisions made at every stage of enforcement.     

Voluntary environmental agreements in developing countries: the Colombian experience

Voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated between environmental regulators and polluters are increasingly popular in developing countries. According to proponents, they can sidestep weak institutions and other pervasive barriers to conventional mandatory regulation in such countries. Yet little is known about the drivers of their use and their effectiveness in poor countries. The considerable literature on voluntary initiatives in industrialized countries, where both VAs and socioeconomic conditions differ, may not apply. Using a conceptual framework drawn from the economics literature, we examine four prominent VAs in Colombia, a global leader in the use of this policy. We find that the main motive for using VAs has been to build capacity needed for broader environmental regulatory reform and that partly as a result, VAs’ additional effect on environmental performance has been limited. These findings contrast with those from industrialized country studies, which typically conclude VAs are used as a low-cost substitute for impending mandatory regulation and have few benefits because of weak regulatory pressure. Our findings suggest that in developing countries, VAs may be best suited to capacity building, not environmental management per se.     

Did Age Discrimination Protections Help Older Workers Weather the Great Recession?

We examine whether stronger age discrimination laws at the state level moderated the impact of the Great Recession on older workers. We use a difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences strategy to compare older and younger workers, in states with stronger and weaker laws, before, during, and after the Great Recession. We find very little evidence that stronger age discrimination protections helped older workers weather the Great Recession, relative to younger workers. The evidence sometimes points in the opposite direction, with stronger state age discrimination protections associated with more adverse effects of the Great Recession on older workers. We suggest that during an experience such as the Great Recession, severe labor market disruptions make it difficult to discern discrimination, weakening the effects of stronger state age discrimination protections. Alternatively, higher termination costs associated with stronger age discrimination protections may do more to deter hiring when future product and labor demand is highly uncertain.     

National Representation in International Organizations: The Seat Allocation Model Implicit in the European Union Council and Parliament

What determines the allocation of voting weights to member states in international organizations? What drives the seat and voting weight allocation in the European Parliament (EP) and in the Council of the European Union (EU)? Our objective in this article is to develop a universal logical model and to demonstrate that the resulting equation indeed captures negotiated outcomes on seat and voting weight allocations in EU institutions from their beginning. We predict seat and voting weight allocations for both the EP and the Council of the EU within one general model. Hence, we do not employ actual data on seat allocations or voting weights in either the EP or the Council of the EU, but instead, use logical constraints exclusively, as posed by the following elements: the total number of seats/voting weights ( S ), the number of member states ( N ) and, finally, their respective population size ( P_i ). Only our final model selection among several theoretical options is guided by empirical information. With no post hoc parameters used, our model fits both the Council of the EU and the EP rather well, over a time span of nearly 40 years. Inspired by the 'seat–vote equation' ( Taagepera, 1973 ) for seat allocation in national legislatures, the new 'seat–population equation' calculates the number ( S _i) of EP seats or Council voting weights of member state i as follows:     , where n =(1/log  N − 1/log  S )/(1/log  N − 1/log  P ), P being the total population (as summed over all member states). We posit that this equation is applicable to predict outcomes in practice whenever voting weight or seat allocations in international organizations are allocated on the basis of the population shares of their component entities.     

Seat share distribution of parties: Models and empirical patterns

We find that strategic sequencing and other factors sort parties roughly into two groups. Low-ranking parties lose part of their inherent support, compared to probabilistic expectations, while high-ranking parties profit from the shift. Our method is to graph the worldwide mean seat shares of parties at various ranks by size against the largest party share (Nagayama triangle format). The resulting empirical pattern looks complex, yet when we adjust a probabilistic model to account for strategic and other factors that may hurt the smaller parties, the fit becomes close. The number of parties that profit from transfers is close to the inverse of the fractional share of the largest party. The model fits best when the transfer is assumed to involve about one-half of inherent minor party support. This is a novel way to estimate the universal average strength of strategic and other factors that work against the smaller parties. The empirical worldwide mean pattern offers us a norm against which seat share distributions in individual countries or single elections can be compared.     

Public‐Sector Unions and the Size of Government

Public‐sector unions are generally thought to increase the size of government through collective bargaining. This article challenges this idea for the case of teacher unions in the United States and argues that while collective bargaining institutions sometimes lead to increased education spending, this is not the norm. Using a new longitudinal data set spanning all states before and after they granted collective bargaining rights to teachers, the article shows that although states that mandate districts to bargain with teachers have higher education expenditures than states that do not, the differences precede collective bargaining. Difference‐in‐differences analyses find no evidence that introducing collective bargaining rights led to average increases in the level of resources devoted to education. Although existing theories cannot explain these null findings, the article shows one reason behind them is that most laws granting collective bargaining rights to teachers were not unambiguously prolabor, but included both pro‐ and anti‐union provisions.     

When Governments Regulate Governments

This article advances a political theory of regulation that accounts for the choices of regulators and regulated entities when both are governments. Leading theories of regulation assume that governments regulate profit‐maximizing firms: Governments set rules, to which firms respond rationally in ways that constrain their behavior. But often the entities that governments regulate are other governments. We argue that government agencies and private firms often face different compliance costs, and that agencies have greater incentives than firms to appeal regulations through political channels. Simultaneously, the typical enforcement instruments that regulators use to influence firm behavior may be less effective against governments. Our empirical subjects are public and private entities’ compliance with the U.S. Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act. We find that, compared with private firms, governments violate these laws significantly more frequently and are less likely to be penalized for violations.     

Seat biases of apportionment methods for proportional representation

In proportional representation systems, an important issue is whether a given apportionment method favors larger parties at the expense of smaller parties. For an arbitrary number of parties, ordered from largest to smallest by their vote counts, we calculate (apparently for the first time) the expected differences between the seat allocation and the ideal share of seats, separately for each party, as a function of district magnitude, with a particular emphasis on three traditional apportionment methods. These are (i) the quota method with residual fit by greatest remainders, associated with the names of Hamilton and Hare, (ii) the divisor method with standard rounding (Webster, Sainte-Laguë), and (iii) the divisor method with rounding down (Jefferson, Hondt). For the first two methods the seat bias of each party turns out to be practically zero, whence on average no party is advantaged or disadvantaged. On the contrary, the third method exhibits noticeable seat biases in favor of larger parties. The theoretical findings are confirmed via empirical data from the German State of Bavaria, the Swiss Canton Solothurn, and the US House of Representatives.     

How fair? Changes in federal income taxation and the distribution of income, 1978 to 1998

In this paper, we determine how tax law and income distribution changes have separately contributed to the changes in tax progressivity over time, and also how a specific pre‐tax distribution of income affects the equalizing ability of a given tax change. We use information from the Current Population Survey for years that follow immediately after significant tax law changes or after the full enactment of these changes to measure the effect of income taxes on income distribution for selected years over the period 1978 to 1998. We find that, even when account is taken of the induced effect of changes in federal income tax laws on pre‐tax income, the individual income tax structure has been less successful in equalizing after‐tax income since the 1980s and into the early 1990s. We also find that a given tax law's equalizing effect on the distribution of income is significantly affected by the pre‐tax distribution of income. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Can impact assessments tame legislative drift? Event history analysis of modifications of laws across Europe

Laws should endure and change only if assumed benefits don't materialize over time. Yet frequent modifications of laws shortly after their enactment distort this compromise between stability and change. While, Impact Assessments (IAs) are designed to improve the quality of legislation, we know little about IAs' impact on legal stability post-enactment. We fill this gap by analysing whether the ex-ante application of IAs influences the incidence and frequency of legal modifications. The analysis is based on a complete dataset of more than 2500 laws in France, Hungary, Italy, and the UK between 2006 and 2012. We apply a comparative event history analysis to account for both first and subsequent modifications. We find across-the-board that IAs are associated with legal stability. IAs are predicted to have the largest effect when political power changes both in terms of seat shares and party ideology, suggesting that IAs can, to some degree, tame legislative drift.     

On political connectedness and the arrest of Ivan Boesky

The bombshell arrest of Ivan Boesky on November 14, 1986 signaled the intention of then-US attorney for the southern district of New York, Rudy Giuliani, to increase enforcement of laws against insider trading. Looking at concurrent stock price changes, we find that New York companies were affected especially. More interestingly, New York firms with active political arms fared better than those without them; and New York firms connected to Mr. Giuliani’s Republican Party fared better still. We find no such effects for non-New York firms. These findings suggest that political connectedness was valuable in the era of more rigorous legal enforcement associated with Mr. Giuliani’s attack on insider trading.