How effective is automobile safety regulation?

Abstract
Loeb(1989) questions the results of recent work on automobile safety inspection (Garbacz and Kelly, 1987) in which the results of a paper by Leob and Gilad (1984) were questioned. Specifically, their time series model, using New Jersey data, is missing a key economic variable (accident price) as well as some well-known variables associated with traffic accidents (yothful drivers and a proxy for drunk driving). An estimate of their model, with US data, results in no statistical effect for automobile inspection variables (Garbacz and Kelly, 1987).