OCR Text |
Show 147 francis family foundation URO P scholar 2011-2012 The issuance of driver licenses and identification cards to immigrants has received increasing attention over the past decade, during which at least 21 states have passed laws restricting undocumented immi-grants' access to them-today, only three states allow the undocumented to drive legally at all. Often, opponents of these laws argued that by issuing driver licenses to undocumented immigrants the number of uninsured motorists would decrease thus improving public safety by driving down the cost as-sociated with car insurance and car crash expenditures, but these arguments have neither taken hold on a national level nor have they been exhaustively studied. Our goal is to assess the validity of the arguments by analyzing data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia from 1990 to 2010, a time period when the undocumented population in the US more than doubled from1.4% of the total population in 1990 to 3.7% in 2008. This, to our knowledge, would be the first cross-state study of the economic effects of restricting or allow-ing undocumented immigrants access to driver's licenses. Presently, we have run a partial model for only 8 years because we are missing data for certain explanatory variables and we are missing half of the years for our proxy variable for uninsured motorists. Our present results are, then, preliminary, and while we do expect our estimations will change with the full model, the partial model finds that restricting undocu-mented immigrants' access to driver's licenses does cause a significant increase in both average annual auto insurance expenditures per driver and in the ratio of uninsured motorist claims to total injury claims; this latter variable we expect to be able to use in order to calculate what portion of the expected costs of driving is attributable restricting undocumented immigrants' access to driver's licenses. HOW DOES ISSUING DRIVER'S LICENSES TO UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS AFFECT INSURANCE EXPENDITURES AND COSTS RELATED TO UNINSURED DRIVERS? Mauricio Caceres (Kenneth Jameson) Department of Economics University of Utah Mauricio Caceres Kenneth Jameson |