IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/revind/v49y2016i2d10.1007_s11151-016-9525-0.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Regulatory Determinants of Railroad Safety

Author

Listed:
  • Jerry Ellig

    (Mercatus Center at George Mason University)

  • Patrick A. McLaughlin

    (Mercatus Center at George Mason University)

Abstract

The dramatic improvement in railroad safety since the 1970s has been accompanied by a substantial increase in safety regulation and a substantial reduction in economic regulation after 1980. We assess the effects of both regulatory changes on railroad safety with the use of RegData: a new data set that was developed by one of the authors that measures the amount of regulation that is imposed by specific regulatory agencies on specific industries. We find that partial economic deregulation is associated with improved safety. Safety regulation was most closely associated with improved railroad safety during the period when economic regulation curtailed railroads’ incentives to operate safely.

Suggested Citation

  • Jerry Ellig & Patrick A. McLaughlin, 2016. "The Regulatory Determinants of Railroad Safety," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 49(2), pages 371-398, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:revind:v:49:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11151-016-9525-0
    DOI: 10.1007/s11151-016-9525-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11151-016-9525-0
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11151-016-9525-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Binswanger, Hans P, 1974. "The Measurement of Technical Change Biases with Many Factors of Production," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 64(6), pages 964-976, December.
    2. Whitney K. Newey & Kenneth D. West, 1994. "Automatic Lag Selection in Covariance Matrix Estimation," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 61(4), pages 631-653.
    3. George J. Stigler, 1971. "The Theory of Economic Regulation," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 2(1), pages 3-21, Spring.
    4. Wilson, Wesley W, 1997. "Cost Savings and Productivity in the Railroad Industry," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 21-40, January.
    5. Bentley Coffey & Patrick McLaughlin & Robert Tollison, 2012. "Regulators and Redskins," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 153(1), pages 191-204, October.
    6. Clarke, William A. & Loeb, Peter D., 2005. "The determinants of train fatalities: keeping the model on track," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 145-158, March.
    7. Dennis, Scott M., 2002. "Changes in Railroad Track Accident Rates," Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, Transportation Research Forum, vol. 41(4).
    8. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    9. S. E. Robertson & K. Sparck Jones, 1976. "Relevance weighting of search terms," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 27(3), pages 129-146, May.
    10. Savage, Ian, 1998. "The economics of railroad safety," 40th Annual Transportation Research Forum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 29-31, 1998 311958, Transportation Research Forum.
    11. Levin, Andrew & Lin, Chien-Fu & James Chu, Chia-Shang, 2002. "Unit root tests in panel data: asymptotic and finite-sample properties," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 108(1), pages 1-24, May.
    12. Golbe, Devra L, 1983. "Product Safety in a Regulated Industry: Evidence from the Railroads," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 21(1), pages 39-52, January.
    13. Ellig, Jerry, 2002. "Railroad Deregulation and Consumer Welfare," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 21(2), pages 143-167, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Trey Malone & Dustin Chambers, 2017. "Quantifying Federal Regulatory Burdens in the Beer Value Chain," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(3), pages 466-471, June.
    2. Patrick A. McLaughlin & Oliver Sherouse, 2019. "RegData 2.2: a panel dataset on US federal regulations," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 180(1), pages 43-55, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sutirtha Bagchi, 2018. "A Tale of Two Cities: An Examination of Medallion Prices in New York and Chicago," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 53(2), pages 295-319, September.
    2. Tsangyao Chang & Gengnan Chiang & Yichun Zhang, 2009. "Is volume index of gdp per capita stationary in oecd countries? panel stationary tests with structural breaks," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 29(2), pages 588-598.
    3. Jönsson, Kristian, 2004. "Testing for Stationarity in Panel Data Models when Disturbances are Cross-Sectionally Correlated," Working Papers 2004:17, Lund University, Department of Economics, revised 26 Nov 2004.
    4. Chien-Chiang Lee & Mei-Se Chien, 2011. "Empirical Modelling of Regional House Prices and the Ripple Effect," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 48(10), pages 2029-2047, August.
    5. Li, Xiao-Lin & Tang, D.P. & Chang, Tsangyao, 2014. "CO2 emissions converge in the 50 U.S. states — Sequential panel selection method," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 320-333.
    6. Pot, Felix Johan & Koster, Sierdjan, 2022. "Small airports: Runways to regional economic growth?," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    7. Ibrahim Bozkurt & Engin Akman, 2016. "Financial Integration into EU: The Romanian Case," The AMFITEATRU ECONOMIC journal, Academy of Economic Studies - Bucharest, Romania, vol. 18(42), pages 269-269, May.
    8. Shi, Huai-Long & Zhou, Wei-Xing, 2022. "Factor volatility spillover and its implications on factor premia," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    9. Anders Johansson, 2009. "An analysis of dynamic risk in the Greater China equity markets," Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(3), pages 299-320.
    10. Jean-Francois Hoarau & Stephane Blancard & Philippe Jean-Pierre, 2009. "Testing for nominal convergence in the Central American area: evidence from panel data unit-root tests," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(11), pages 1171-1174.
    11. Lahiri, Kajal & Peng, Huaming & Zhao, Yongchen, 2015. "Testing the value of probability forecasts for calibrated combining," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 113-129.
    12. Geoffrey Booth, G. & Ciner, Cetin, 1997. "International transmission on information in corn futures markets," Journal of Multinational Financial Management, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 175-187, October.
    13. Fan, Jianqing & Liao, Yuan & Shi, Xiaofeng, 2015. "Risks of large portfolios," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 186(2), pages 367-387.
    14. Ekaterini Panopoulou, 2005. "A Resolution of the Fisher Effect Puzzle: A Comparison of Estimators," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2005 18, Money Macro and Finance Research Group.
    15. Lüders, Erik & Lüders-Amann, Inge & Schröder, Michael, 2004. "The Power Law and Dividend Yields," ZEW Discussion Papers 04-51, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    16. Diego Amaya & Jean-François Bégin & Geneviève Gauthier, 2022. "The Informational Content of High-Frequency Option Prices," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(3), pages 2166-2201, March.
    17. Bampinas, Georgios & Panagiotidis, Theodore, 2016. "Hedging inflation with individual US stocks: A long-run portfolio analysis," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 374-392.
    18. repec:wsr:wpaper:y:2010:i:057 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Wouter J. Den Haan & Andrew T. Levin, 1995. "Inferences from parametric and non-parametric covariance matrix estimation procedures," International Finance Discussion Papers 504, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    20. Masaru Chiba, 2023. "Robust and efficient specification tests in Markov-switching autoregressive models," Statistical Inference for Stochastic Processes, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 99-137, April.
    21. Adamopoulos Antonios, 2010. "Credit Market Development and Economic Growth: An Empirical Analysis for Ireland," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(4), pages 3-18.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Railroad; Railroad safety; Regulation; Safety regulation; Staggers Act; RegData;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
    • K23 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Regulated Industries and Administrative Law
    • L51 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy - - - Economics of Regulation
    • L92 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Railroads and Other Surface Transportation
    • R41 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - Transportation: Demand, Supply, and Congestion; Travel Time; Safety and Accidents; Transportation Noise

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:revind:v:49:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11151-016-9525-0. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.