I imagine that a law that anyone who dies while riding a motorcycle without a helmet is automatically considered to be registered as a willing deceased organ donor would increase the voluntary use of helmets. Here's a paper that investigates the relationship between helmet laws and transplants under current laws, which vary by state and over time.
Allocating Scarce Organs: How a Change in Supply Affects Transplant Waiting Lists and Transplant Recipients
By Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Keith Teltser
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2019, 11(4): 210–239 https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20170476
Abstract: "Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the sup-ply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of US transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply induced by state-level motorcycle helmet laws, we demonstrate that each organ that becomes available from a deceased donor in a particular region induces five transplant candidates to join that region’s transplant wait list, while crowding out living-donor transplants. Even with the corresponding demand increase, positive supply shocks increase post-transplant survival rates."
"We find that transplant candidates respond strongly to local supply shocks, along two dimensions. First, for each new organ that becomes available in a market, roughly five new candidates join the local wait list. With detailed zip code data, we demonstrate that candidates listed in multiple locations and candidates living out-side of the local market disproportionately drive demand responses. Second, kidney transplant recipients substitute away from living-donor transplants. We estimate the largest crowd out of potential transplants from living donors who are neither blood relatives nor spouses, suggesting that these are the marginal cases in which the relative costs of living-donor and deceased-donor transplants are most influential. Taken together, these findings show that increases in the supply of organs generate demand behavior that at least partially offsets a shock’s direct effects. Presumably as a result of this offset, the average waiting time for an organ does not measurably decrease in response to a positive supply shock. However, for livers, hearts, lungs, and pancreases, we find evidence that an increase in the supply of deceased organs increases the probability that a transplant is successful, defined as graft survival. Among kidney transplant recipients, we hypothesize that living donor crowd out mitigates any health outcome gains resulting from increases in deceased-donor transplants.
...
"The SRTR data show that multi-listing is not common, with only 6 percent of all candidates choosing to do so at a point in time (online Appendix A describes how we identify multi-listed candidates and spells in the data). However, those who multi-list are systematically different from those who do not, with higher probabili-ties of having attended some college (46 percent versus 36 percent), higher rates of employment (44 percent versus 33 percent), and lower rates of insurance coverage via Medicaid (5 percent versus 11.5 percent). Not surprisingly, they are also more likely to register outside their own or a bordering DSA (12 percent) than candidates with a single listing (4 percent).
...
"the percentage of liver candidates who receive a transplant within 5 years of listing ranged from 30.5 percent in New York to 86.1 percent in Arkansas (Israni, et al. 2012, 70). Similarly, “a striking (but not new) observation is the tremendous difference ... in the percent-age of wait-listed patients who undergo deceased donor kidney transplant within 5 years,” varying from roughly 25 percent in California DSAs to 67 percent in Wisconsin (Israni, et al. 2012, 13).
...
"in the early 1970s most states had universal helmet laws because the federal government tied state highway construction funds to such laws (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) 2018). By the mid-1970s, states successfully lob-bied Congress to break that link, and states began repealing their universal helmet laws (IIHS 2018).
...
"Using state-level OPTN data from 1994 to 2007, Dickert-Conlin, Elder and Moore (2011)—henceforth, DCEM—uses 6 state-level repeals and 1 enactment of a universal helmet law to estimate that repealing universal helmet laws increases the supply of organ donors who die in motor vehicle accidents by roughly 10 percent."
*********
This paper is part of an exciting line of work that I've blogged about earlier:
Allocating Scarce Organs: How a Change in Supply Affects Transplant Waiting Lists and Transplant Recipients
By Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Keith Teltser
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2019, 11(4): 210–239 https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20170476
Abstract: "Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the sup-ply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of US transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply induced by state-level motorcycle helmet laws, we demonstrate that each organ that becomes available from a deceased donor in a particular region induces five transplant candidates to join that region’s transplant wait list, while crowding out living-donor transplants. Even with the corresponding demand increase, positive supply shocks increase post-transplant survival rates."
"We find that transplant candidates respond strongly to local supply shocks, along two dimensions. First, for each new organ that becomes available in a market, roughly five new candidates join the local wait list. With detailed zip code data, we demonstrate that candidates listed in multiple locations and candidates living out-side of the local market disproportionately drive demand responses. Second, kidney transplant recipients substitute away from living-donor transplants. We estimate the largest crowd out of potential transplants from living donors who are neither blood relatives nor spouses, suggesting that these are the marginal cases in which the relative costs of living-donor and deceased-donor transplants are most influential. Taken together, these findings show that increases in the supply of organs generate demand behavior that at least partially offsets a shock’s direct effects. Presumably as a result of this offset, the average waiting time for an organ does not measurably decrease in response to a positive supply shock. However, for livers, hearts, lungs, and pancreases, we find evidence that an increase in the supply of deceased organs increases the probability that a transplant is successful, defined as graft survival. Among kidney transplant recipients, we hypothesize that living donor crowd out mitigates any health outcome gains resulting from increases in deceased-donor transplants.
...
"The SRTR data show that multi-listing is not common, with only 6 percent of all candidates choosing to do so at a point in time (online Appendix A describes how we identify multi-listed candidates and spells in the data). However, those who multi-list are systematically different from those who do not, with higher probabili-ties of having attended some college (46 percent versus 36 percent), higher rates of employment (44 percent versus 33 percent), and lower rates of insurance coverage via Medicaid (5 percent versus 11.5 percent). Not surprisingly, they are also more likely to register outside their own or a bordering DSA (12 percent) than candidates with a single listing (4 percent).
...
"the percentage of liver candidates who receive a transplant within 5 years of listing ranged from 30.5 percent in New York to 86.1 percent in Arkansas (Israni, et al. 2012, 70). Similarly, “a striking (but not new) observation is the tremendous difference ... in the percent-age of wait-listed patients who undergo deceased donor kidney transplant within 5 years,” varying from roughly 25 percent in California DSAs to 67 percent in Wisconsin (Israni, et al. 2012, 13).
...
"in the early 1970s most states had universal helmet laws because the federal government tied state highway construction funds to such laws (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) 2018). By the mid-1970s, states successfully lob-bied Congress to break that link, and states began repealing their universal helmet laws (IIHS 2018).
...
"Using state-level OPTN data from 1994 to 2007, Dickert-Conlin, Elder and Moore (2011)—henceforth, DCEM—uses 6 state-level repeals and 1 enactment of a universal helmet law to estimate that repealing universal helmet laws increases the supply of organ donors who die in motor vehicle accidents by roughly 10 percent."
*********
This paper is part of an exciting line of work that I've blogged about earlier:
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