When Unemployment Falls, Thousands of Americans Die

Who says recessions are all bad? About 5,000 fewer people die every year in auto accidents for each 1 percentage point increase in U.S. unemployment because downturns keep dangerous drivers off the road.

“We have documented an instance of a natural economic force that impels riskier drivers to drive less while not discouraging safer drivers,” say Clifford Winston, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, and Vikram Maheshri, an economist at the University of Houston, in a forthcoming study in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.

Previous research had shown that people generally drive less during economic contractions, which naturally contributes to a reduction in fatalities. The innovation by Winston and Maheshri was to show that the biggest decline is in driving by the worst drivers.