Effects of State Child Safety Seat Laws on Injuries and Fatalities

描述（由申请人提供）：在过去的五年里，大多数州颁布了法律，要求四岁以上的儿童使用儿童安全座椅和后排座椅。然而，仍有13个州不要求使用儿童安全座椅，许多州只要求在6岁之前使用约束装置。虽然有研究表明这些做法在医学上是否能有效减少儿童死亡和受伤，但没有研究审查颁布这些法律是否对儿童的结局有任何影响。我们建议检查法律是否减少了死亡和伤害，我们还建议量化法律的影响，并评估法律增加后座和儿童安全座椅使用率的程度。此外，我们比较了初级和二级执法的结果，并检查了具有不同最高年龄要求的州的结果。最后，我们研究了法律是否需要几年的时间才能实现其效果。我们将使用来自三个公开数据集的数据：“死亡分析报告系统（FARS）”，“一般估计调查（GES），每年5万起机动车碰撞的全国代表性样本”汽车法律摘要（美国汽车协会，各年）。这些数据将组合成1995-2007年的时间序列数据，其中包括每个州和哥伦比亚特区每年的观测数据。为了确定州政策变化的影响，我们估计了采用州和年份固定效应、控制变量和不应受立法影响的比较组的模型。

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.