1.2 A sample honors paper  (Page 2/6)

The theoretical justifications for the per se BAC level rule is (1) that it will provide a disincentive for individuals to drive after drinking and (2) that it will reduce the cost of prosecuting DUI drivers. In terms of economics the law aims to reduce the negative externalities created by drunk drivers. The question to be examined in this paper is whether the per se laws have reduce the number of automobile fatalities. Persumably, if the law is successful in reducing the number of DUI drivers, it will reduce the number of accidents they cause and, thus, reduce the number of DUI fatalities. Whether the per se BAC law does reduce the number of automobile fatalities—and, thus, is a useful law—is the empirical issue this paper proposes to investigate.

Exercises

1. The introduction or section 2 should include a discussion of the current state of the literature. What, if anything, is written in economics journals about the impact of DUI laws on the automobile fatality rate?
2. The introduction presented above is very "thin". How would you fill out this discussion? Is this the appropriate place to introduce a discussion of the institutional history of the adoption of the per se BAC law?
3. How would your introduction be affected by the results you report later in the paper?
4. A priori , do you think that the per se BAC law is an effective way of reduing drunk driving or is it just a placebo for voters upset with drunk drives (like MOM)? Does it "matter" to you as a researcher whether the per se BAC law is effective?

Theoretical issues

Any model of automobile fatalities is a function of the unit of observation. Since we are interested in the impact of state laws on automobile fatalities, it seems reasonable that we construct a model to explain the differences in automobile fatalities at the state level (although it is tempting to use county level data). There are interstate differences that potentially explain differences in fatalities. First, people drive more in phyically larger states and states with larger populations than they do in other states. since more driving increases the probability of an accident, we need to standardize our measure of fatalities by the vehicle miles driven in the state. It is traditional in the empirical literature to measure the number of fatalities as fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles driven rather than the number of fatalities; in the interest of simplicity we follow this tradition.