Understanding the Decline in Drinking and Driving During 'The Other Great Moderation'

We show that the dynamics of drinking and driving can be adequately described using a simple measure: the fraction of accidents involving drinking drivers. Using this measure, we develop a basic traffic safety model that improves estimates of drunk driving laws’ effects and breaks down declines in drinking and driving into components associated with each major influence that has been identified in the literature–including unobservable “social forces.” In this decomposition, we find that the widespread enactment of key drunk driving laws explains only one-fifth of the reduction in drinking and driving in the 1980s and 1990s, comparable to the effects of demographics and alcohol consumption and less than that of social forces. “The Other Great Moderation” is best understood as a two-decade movement of drinking and driving to a new steady state, which was led by a shift in social attitudes and cemented and extended by law