Do Nighttime Driving Restrictions Reduce Criminal Participation Among Teenagers? Evidence From Graduated Driver Licensing

Abstract

To date, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have a three‐stage Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) system that phases in driving privileges for teenagers. GDL laws effectively impose a statutory driving curfew and a limitation on the number of passengers in motor vehicles. Both the timing of motor vehicle access and a limitation on the peer influences available in a motor vehicle could significantly affect the production of criminal behavior. Using the Uniform Crime Reports 1995 to 2011 and a triple‐differences approach, we find that the implementation of GDL decreased criminal participation by 6 percent among teenagers ages 16 and 17, as measured by arrests. These effects are larger in magnitude in states where the nighttime driving curfew is required for a longer period of time. We also show that GDL plays an important role in reducing crime in periods of low gasoline prices, a time when teen driver prevalence would otherwise have been high. These results suggest that there is another benefit to states for adopting GDL laws and provide insight into the production of teenage crime.

Office‐based mental healthcare and juvenile arrests

“…Although arrests are not a perfect measure of juvenile criminal behavior and understate the true level of crime (Gould et al., 2002), such data can serve as a reasonable representation of underlying criminal activity. Further, arrest data are commonly used within the economics literature as they offer the opportunity to isolate offender demographics and thus shed light on questions not otherwise possible to study (Anderson, 2014; Chu, 2015; Dave et al., 2021; Deza & Litwok, 2016; Kline, 2012). Because we do not consider all crimes, instead only those crimes that lead to arrests, our results will likely underestimate the true gains (in terms of reduced crime) attributable to expanding local access to office‐based mental healthcare.…”

Teenage Driving, Mortality, and Risky Behaviors

“…Drug overdose deaths among teenagers, however, are mostly caused by opioids (both illegal and prescription) and sedatives. The teenage driving literature has investigated the effects of graduated driver licensing laws on motor vehicle fatalities (Dee, Grabowski, and Morrisey 2005;Morrisey et al 2006;Karaca-Mandic and Ridgeway 2010;Gilpin 2019) and crime (Deza and Litwok 2016) and has investigated the effects of the MDA on crash risk (Foss et al 2011;Chapman, Masten, and Browning 2014;Curry et al 2015).…”

The effects of graduated driver licensing on teenage body weight

“…For our baseline analysis, we take teenagers aged 15-17 as the treatment group as suggested by Dee et al (2005) and Karaca-Mandic and Ridgeway (2010). But we also conduct a robustness check by narrowing down our treatment group to those aged 16-17 as in Deza and Litwok (2016), holding the control group constant. The estimated results reported in Table 4 using this alternative treatment group are comparable in both size and significance to our baseline results…”

“…Using our sample data, we estimate the effects of GDL on weight status and weight‐related behaviors among teenagers aged 15–17 relative to those aged 18 or above. As in most prior GDL studies, we apply a binary indicator for whether a state has an intermediate stage during each year focusing on a night curfew and/or a passenger restriction, which indicates the presence of GDL (Dee et al., 2005; Deza & Litwok, 2016). We also estimate the effects of GDL across different levels of restrictiveness for state‐years.…”

“…20 20 Alternatively, Deza and Litwok (2016) limit the treatment group to those aged 16–17. As a robustness check, we also run regressions excluding teenagers aged 15 and we discuss the estimated results in Section 4.4. …”