Put your FTSE down: Wealth Shocks and Road Traffic Collisions

This paper examines the impact of a key source of wealth (the stock market) on road traffic collisions. Using data on over 2 million road accidents we do not find a linear relationship between stock prices and road crashes (fatal or otherwise) in Great Britain. However, we do find a V-shaped effect – collisions respond to the absolute change in stock market returns. The results are robust to a series of falsification exercises that potentially support a causal interpretation. We also examine another source of wealth that has not previously been examined – house prices. Similarly, we do not find that changes in monthly house prices have an impact on accidents, but a symmetric V-shaped is also shown for slight and serious accidents.