When the market drives you crazy: Stock market returns and fatal car accidents.

This paper provides evidence that daily fluctuations in the stock market have important - and hitherto neglected - spillover effects on fatal car accidents. Using the universe of fatal car accidents in the United States from 1990 to 2015, we find that a one standard deviation reduction in daily stock market returns is associated with a 0.6% increase in fatal car accidents that happen after the stock market opening. A battery of falsification tests supports a causal interpretation of this finding. Our results are consistent with immediate emotions stirred by a negative stock market performance influencing the number of fatal accidents, in particular among inexperienced investors.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Journal of Health Economics

• Publication date

  2020-01-20

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Business, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/J.JHEALECO.2019.102245PMID 32006856
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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