Open Access

Sebastian Scheler

• Road crashes play a substantial role in depressing GDP, especially in low- and middle-income countries. The economic welfare of countries is adversely affected, and governments must try to correct this market failure. The conditions that obtain in Turkey, Costa Rica, and the European Union are conducive to analyzing regulatory policies in the field of traffic accidents. Since Turkey and Costa Rica introduced periodic technical inspections recently, data from before and after their introduction is available and can be compared. I obtained exclusive inspection data from Turkey for the analysis. For Costa Rica, I derived cost-unit rates that had not been calculated before, which allowed me to rank and evaluate regulatory measures that may be adopted in the future. The Covid-19 pandemic made it possible to study another set of policy interventions. That study complements the first two papers. The observed effects are examined in the context of the efforts of the European Union to reduce deadly traffic accidents over the last few decades. By analyzing data from before and after government interventions, I show the impact as well as the shortcomings of specific policies in different countries or regions and discuss their welfare effect. Furthermore, this dissertation provides evidence for the claim that introducing periodic technical inspections, a policy intervention that can tackle the problem of frequent traffic accidents, is cost effective and thus exerts a positive effect on the economy.