Effect of changes in oil prices on the incidence of road accidents in Metro Manila
Date
2018-04
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Abstract
With the increasing trend of road fatalities domestically, we aim to determine whether road accidents are driven by oil price fluctuations. We used the Metro Manila Accidents Recording and Analysis System (MMARAS) Database, crude prices from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), and local retail oil prices from the Department of Energy. Since domestic oil prices are only available from 2014 to 2017, we made predictions of domestic oil prices of the years prior to 2014 using a fitted relationship of domestic prices to Brent. We determined the final model by eliminating some of the lagged Brent values using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). We then used these predicted domestic prices in examining the relationship between accidents and fuel prices. In our regression runs, we successively introduced various lags in fuel prices and used Newey West standard errors to account for possible autocorrelation of the error terms. The results show that contemporaneous prices of oil have statistically significant positive relationship with the number of accidents. However, the effect washes away when lags are introduced. The regression runs with public utility vehicles register lower adjusted R-squared, suggesting that there may be other sources of variations in accidents for their vehicle types.
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Keywords
oil prices, road accident, Metro Manila