A decline in drinking and driving could be due to stricter penalties as well as enhanced media publicity, which increases public knowledge of drinking and driving laws. However, most research fails to control for the effects of increased media coverage. Employing a unique data set consisting of the blood alcohol content (BAC) levels of fatally injured drivers in Canada from 1982 to 1992, I find that both stricter penalties and an increase in the number of newspaper articles related to drinking and driving are significantly correlated with reduced alcohol consumption. Further, omitting proxies for media coverage results in biased coefficient estimates of the efficacy of stricter penalties. These results suggest that the enactment of sterner punishment must be supplemented with public education programs.
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Paper provided by University of Waterloo, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
02005.
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