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[The aim of this paper is to ascertain the effect of speed limit on number of accidents on rural roads of
U.S using two different models of regression and using two different statistical softwares. The two
different methods yield two different results. It is up to a statisian to pick either of the methods. Passing
judgment on any model is not the purpose of this paper. However as authors we prefer the first
method]
Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
Acknowledgement
First and foremost, we would like to pay our utmost Gratitude to Almighty Allah for blessing us with all
the health, strength and courage to carry out this whole process.
We would also like to thank our course instructor, Sir Muhammad Abdus Salam for his support,
guidance and encouragement throughout the semester to proceed further with the project.
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 4
Resources Used ............................................................................................................................................. 4
Explanation of Variables ............................................................................................................................... 5
Analysis ......................................................................................................................................................... 6
Method 1: ............................................................................................................................................. 6
Method No. 2 ...................................................................................................................................... 11
Unit Root Test For RTOTACC ............................................................................................................... 12
Unit Root Test For UNEM .................................................................................................................... 13
Unit Root Test For RTOTACC with first difference .............................................................................. 15
Unit Root Test For Unem with first difference ................................................................................... 17
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 21
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 22
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
Introduction
In 1986 the state of California raised its maximum speed limit from 55 miles per hour to 65 miles per
hour. There were numerous studies conducted to find whether the increase in the speed law has
resulted in any increase in the number of accidents in the rural areas. Some studies such as those of
Arthur Van Benthems claimed that the new speed law has been a major factor contributing to the
increase in the number of accidents1; however there were some studies which claimed otherwise. Our
aim is to investigate the general association of increase in speed limit on the number of accidents on
rural road.
To test this theory we have taken the null hypothesis that the new speed law does not have an impact
on number of rural accidents and alternate hypothesis - the speed law has resulted in an increase in the
number of accidents.
HO = Speed law does not have any effect on the number of rural accidents
We have taken the total accidents in rural areas (rtotacc) as dependent variable and speed law (spdlaw)
as independent variable. Furthermore, we have added some additional variables such as seat belt law
(beltlaw), as well as unemployment (unem) and weekends (wkends). In addition we have included the
months to find out if accidents were high during the vacation season.
Resources Used
The data for the report has been collected from Problem C10.11 from Introductory Econometrics: A
Modern Approach by By Jeffrey M. Wooldridge. We have used a total of 108 observations regarding
automobile accidents, traffic rule, weekends and other variables for the period from January 1981 to
December 1989.
The software which we have used for our report are Strata and Eviews along with MS Excel
1
Do We Need Speed Limits on Freeways? Arthur van Benthem
http://www.economics.uci.edu/files/news_events/2012/VanBentham_jobpaper.pdf
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
Explanation of Variables
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
Analysis
There can be two methods to analyze time series data: 1). Introduce a time independent variable along
with seasonal dummies 2). First differencing method with seasonal dummies
Method 1:
We first ran the simple regression test with time (t) to account for time series on the data which gave
the following result:
Source SS df MS Number of obs = 107
F( 2, 104) = 89.19
Model 438102.209 2 219051.105 Prob > F = 0.0000
Residual 255430.408 104 2456.06161 R-squared = 0.6317
Adj R-squared = 0.6246
Total 693532.617 106 6542.76054 Root MSE = 49.559
The Beta coefficient of spdlaw turns out to be positive. This shows that on average increase in speed
limit from 55 to 65 resulted in a 64.66 increase in accidents.
However the above regression is very simple and needs to be refined by incorporating omitted
variables. Also other checks have to be performed to check robustness of the model.
Time series data generally follows seasonal trend so it needs to be de-seasonalized. To do this we
introduce dummy variables of seasonal months keeping January as base group. The purpose of doing
this is that according to our experience road traffic does not remain uniform across all months. There
might be abnormal traffic in holiday seasons or vacations. This means that we have accounted for
seasonality and it will not reflect in our Beta coefficient of spdlaw. Thus as expected it decreases to
55.75 from 64.66.
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
High coefficients for June, July and Aug might be because people travel more during these seasons
which increases the chance of road accidents.
To check if we have not incorporated any important explanatory variable, we perform Omitted variable
bias test:
We reject null hypothesis and our model requires more explanatory variables. Keeping this in mind we
introduce Belt law variable to our model and see its impact.
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
Source SS df MS Number of obs = 107
F( 14, 92) = 53.21
Model 617292.975 14 44092.3554 Prob > F = 0.0000
Residual 76239.6414 92 828.691754 R-squared = 0.8901
Adj R-squared = 0.8733
Total 693532.617 106 6542.76054 Root MSE = 28.787
Belt law was introduced in U.S on January 1986. Beta coefficient of Beltlaw is significant but
interestingly it is positive. Introduction of beltlaw increased accidents by 31.69 on average. This might
be due to psychology of the driver who after feeling safe with a seat belt drives rashly and causes
accidents. There have been studies conducted which also support the claim that seat belts increase road
accidents.
Our Omitted variables score has also improved but still there are some more variables that need to be
incorporated. If we introduce unemployment rate variable then:
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
Source SS df MS Number of obs = 107
F( 15, 91) = 49.88
Model 618325.958 15 41221.7305 Prob > F = 0.0000
Residual 75206.6587 91 826.446799 R-squared = 0.8916
Adj R-squared = 0.8737
Total 693532.617 106 6542.76054 Root MSE = 28.748
P-value of unem variable lies in the insignificant region so it does not have much of an impact on rural
accidents.
Hence we can drop unemployment rate variable. Our final model has Speed law, beltlaw, Time (t) and
seasonal dummies explaining Total accidents on rural roads while unemployment is an insignificant
variable. Our model is explained 89.16% with R-Square: 0.8916
After adding explanatory independent variables we need to check if multi-collinearity exists between
them. For this we make use of Variance Inflation factors (VIF):
t 5.50 0.181715
beltlaw 4.31 0.232275
unem 3.13 0.319326
spdlaw 2.82 0.354684
sep 1.90 0.525567
oct 1.90 0.525672
may 1.90 0.526797
nov 1.90 0.527688
aug 1.87 0.534341
apr 1.87 0.534881
jun 1.87 0.535446
jul 1.85 0.541535
mar 1.84 0.542904
feb 1.83 0.545570
dec 1.81 0.552294
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
Our maximum VIF value is 5.5 while our Mean VIF is 2.42 which is well below the bench mark of 5. So
there is no multi-collinearity in our independent variables.
Since our data is time series so we use tsset t, monthly command and then use archlm command.
. tsset t, monthly
time variable: t, 1960m2 to 1969m1
delta: 1 month
. estat archlm
LM test for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH)
1 0.168 1 0.6817
Our P-value comes out to be 0.6817 so we fail to reject our null hypothesis. There is no Autoregressive
conditional heteroscadasticity. Hence our data is Homoscedastic.
(Y)rtotacc=51.46spdlaw+31.69beltlaw+0.88t-10.66Feb+48.24mar+43.02apr+70.75may+
83.65jun+122.21jul+135.77aug+80.34sep+40.45oct+58.57nov+66.23dec
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Method No. 2
A second way of running the regression is first stabilizing the series that follow time trend and then
running the regression. Stabalization is done by first differencing. Lets begin by seeing which series is
following a time trend. To check whether the data is stationary or not, we used E-views and plotted the
data points.
As we can see from the above graph that our datas intercept is not at zero while the slope has an
upward trend, which shows that this variable is non-stationary. This means that we will not be able to
run simple regression on our current data, hence we will have to make some adjustments to it.
We applied the same process on other variable Unem (unemployment) and found that it was also non-
stationary.
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UNEM
12
11
10
4
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
The graph for unemployment showed similar result since the graph was downward sloping.
Furthermore, we conducted Augmented Dickey-Fuller Unit Root Test on rtotacc and Unem to check the
stationarity of the data set variables. We found that the p-value of rtotacc and Unem to be 0.99 and
0.3479 respectively, which proved that the data is non-stationary.
t-Statistic Prob.*
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t-Statistic Prob.*
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-
UNEM(-1) 0.006216 0.007361 -0.844485 0.4003
To make the above data points (total number of rural accidents and unemployment) stationary, we took
first difference Augmented Dickey-Fuller Unit Root Test on on rtotacc and Unem on first difference.
From the first difference, we found that the p-value of both rtotacc and Unem to be 0.0000 which
showed that the data has now become stationary.
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t-Statistic Prob.*
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1st Diff(rtot )
200
100
-100
-200
-300
-400
-500
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
t-Statistic Prob.*
-
D(UNEM(-1)) 1.312866 0.144993 -9.054714 0.0000
D(UNEM(-1),2) 0.184486 0.097427 1.893586 0.0611
C 0.048384 0.114075 0.424140 0.6724
-
@TREND(1) 0.001504 0.001821 -0.825965 0.4108
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Prob(F-statistic) 0.000000
This shows that by applying the first difference our data has become stationary.
1st diff(unemp)
2
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Now we are ready to run the run the regression, on the data.
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Speed limit impact on accidents in U.S 2016
As we can see from the above table, our Co-efficient of Determination (R-squared) for the above
variables is 0.56, which shows that our data is significantly fitted to the regression line i.e.56% of our
response variable has been explained by the model. For our model, we see that spdlaw has p-value of
0.97, which shows that it is insignificant. Stdiffunemp and beltlaw have a p-value of 0.23 and 0.74
respectively i.e. they do not have a significant impact on the above model.
Our maximum VIF is 2.18 while Mean VIF is 1.95. This shows that our data has no multi-collinearity.
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We also conduct Omitted variable test to see if any significant variable is missing from our model. We
fail to reject null hypothesis as P-value is greater than 0.05(5% level of significance). Hence there is no
Omitted variable bias in our model.
From the above analysis we come to a conclusion that there is no significant impact of speed law on
number of road accidents. Hence we accept our null hypothesis. Our regression equation is:
(Y)stdiffrtot=-10.14stdiffunemp+0.42spdlaw+3.27beltlaw-2.24wkends+60.42Feb-
0.19mar+38.65apr+25.04may+51.67jun+17.14jul-49.04aug-31.82sep+28.46oct+21.49nov-
51.67dec+20.04
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Conclusion
In this paper we presented two ways to progress with regression analysis. The purpose was to discuss
the two methods. Two statisticians can adopt two different methods and approach at two different
results. It is improper to pass judgment on any method and as such passing judgment falls out of the
domain of our paper. One method yielded results that showed significant impact of road accidents
while the other method did not find significance of speed law on number of accidents.
However, we must take the results presented with a pinch of salt since there might be other variables
like weather conditions or road quality which have an impact on road accidents and could not be
included due to unavailability of data.
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Bibliography
1. https://books.google.com.pk/books?id=64vt5TDBNLwC&pg=PA375&lpg=PA375&dq=econometr
ic+wooldridge+traffic+2&source=bl&ots=Jz-
WnHgzub&sig=5uIzW8BA2uE0RSGTroxYTj3wIw8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjHopP0xY3MAhU
GYJoKHVTZDr8Q6AEIJjAC#v=onepage&q=econometric%20wooldridge%20traffic%202&f=false
(Link for Book and Question)
2. http://ajbuckeconbikesail.net/Econ3503/Data/TRAFFIC2.txt (Link for data set)
http://ajbuckeconbikesail.net/Econ3503/Autocorr_Hwk/Autocorrelation_Key.html
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