Abstract Summary/Description
According to recent estimates, approximately 37% of Americans indicate an inability to cover an emergency $400 expense using liquid savings. One such expense is fines for traffic violations. If unpaid, the original fine not only increases in nominal value but may result in suspension of driving privileges and even incarceration. Unpaid traffic fines result in instances of failure to pay (FTP) or failure to appear (FTA). Existing work highlights the detrimental consequences of traffic fines on household finances. We, however, lack knowledge about the determinants of FTP or FTA. In this paper, I examine how exposures to natural disasters affect the FTP or FTA likelihood. I construct novel data on traffic citations by scraping the Oklahoma State Court Network (OSCN). With information on the initial appearance date and the onset of natural disasters, I use the RDD empirical framework to uncover causal estimates of natural disaster exposure on the likelihood of FTP or FTA instances. Natural disaster exposure increases the likelihood of an FTP or FTA instance on a traffic citation by 5.7 percentage points, an increase of 26.14% over the pre-natural disaster mean. The increased likelihood of FTP or FTA instances persists for more than 100 days following the natural disaster onset. Preliminary estimates suggest that disadvantaged subpopulations--black and lower income--have a more pronounced increase in the likelihood of an FTP or FTA instance after the natural disaster. I also find that there is a marked increase in total costs associated with traffic citations after natural disasters.
