Would you believe the National Highway Safety Administration is interfering with birth rates in our great nation? The following abstract is from the SSRN site, and isn’t brand new, dated in 2020 and updated in 2021. The authors are a couple of business school profs, if you can credit it.
Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back.
Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied).
We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.
Talk about unintended consequences … wow! Like everybody else my age we never sat in a car safety seat and survived the experience without trauma. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.
