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Show 155 THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH research posters on the hill 2012 HOW DOES ISSUING DRIVER'S LICENSES TO UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS AFFECT INSURANCE EXPENDI-TURES AND COSTS RELATED TO UNINSURED DRIVERS? Mauricio Caceres (Kenneth Jameson) Department of Economics University of Utah How does issuing driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants affect insurance expenditures? Mauricio Caceres and Kenneth P. Jameson Economics Department Student Photo Logo For Student Support The Francis Family Foundation Image upper middle Image upper right 3 Subtitle text upper right Mauricio Caceres Kenneth P. Jameson • Surge in immigration for last two decades • From 1.4% of the population in 1990 to 3.73 in 2008, or from 3.5 to 11.34 million • Increase in states passing immigration bills • Specially for driver's licenses and IDs • Increase in "documented presence" laws: undocumented immigrants cannot access driver's licenses • Against: Cost reduction and public safety • Favor: Principle; no real gain from allowing access • There is no study analyzing the effects of documented presence laws for all 50 states and the District of Columbia • Cost reduction • Undocumented immigrants access driver's licenses and insurance, so there are fewer uninsured drivers • Fewer uninsured drivers should translate to lower insurance expenditures • Public safety • Fewer accidents as undocumented drivers become regulated • Method: linear regression models for panel data • Data issues • Measurement problems • Missing data • Conclusion • Documented presence laws annual increase insurance expenditures by 3.3% on average • At least some evidence of cost reduction 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 immigrants' 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. |