Effects of State Child Safety Seat Laws on Injuries and Fatalities

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The last five years have been a period when the majority of states enacted laws to require the use of child safety seats and rear seating for children above age four. However, there are still 13 states that do not require the use of child safety seats, and many states only require the use of restraints up to age six. While there has been research regarding whether these practices are medically effective in reducing childhood fatalities and injuries, there has been no research that examines whether enacting these laws has any effect on children's outcomes. We propose to examine whether the laws reduce fatalities and injuries, and we also propose to quantify the impacts of the laws and assess how much the laws increase the rate of rear seating and child safety seat use. Furthermore, we compare the outcomes under primary and secondary enforcement, and we examine outcomes for states with different maximum age requirements. Finally we study whether the laws take several years to realize their effects. We will use data from three publicly-available data sets: "The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)" The General Estimates Survey (GES), a nationally representative sample of 50,000 motor vehicle collisions each year "Digest of Motor Laws (American Automobile Association, various years). These data will be combined to form a time series of data from 1995-2007 that contains an observation for each state and the District of Columbia (D.C.) in each year. We estimate models that employ state and year fixed effects, control variables, and comparison groups that should not have been affected by the legislation in order to identify the effects of the state policy changes. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project examines the effects of state child safety seat laws for children aged 4-9 on 1) children being restrained in child safety seats, and 2) child fatalities and injuries. We combine three publicly-available data sets to examine these issues at the state level between 1995 and 2007.