Size of economic activity and occurrence of fatal traffic accidents: a count panel data analysis on Fukuoka prefecture in Japan

In this paper, the investigation is conducted on the relationship between the number of fatalities by dint of traffic accidents and the gross municipal product, by using the panel data whose crosssectional units are composed of municipalities in Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan. It turns out that the conventional quasi-differenced GMM estimator gives unconvincing results, while some of the GMM estimators proposed by Kitazawa (2007) give convincing results. The convincing results suggest that the diseconomy of scale is recognized in the occurrence of traffic fatalities.