Historical data confirm that rural roadways carry less than half of America’s traffic but account for the majority of the nation’s vehicular deaths. According to NHTSA, Wyoming has the highest crash fatality rate in the nation with a reported 2009 road death rate of 24.6 per 100,000 population, more than twice the national average of 11.0. High speed two-lane rural roads are believed to contrib...

BACKGROUND Road traffic fatalities (RTF) are among the top ten causes of deaths in the world. The risk factors for RTF fatal victims have been extensively characterized, but studies of household burden of RTF have been very few in number. Accordingly, this article investigates post-crash impacts on RTF victims' family members, including the adverse impacts of lost income, occupational disruptio...

We study a rational expectation model of bubbles and crashes. The model has two components: (1) our key assumption is that a crash may be caused by local self-reinforcing imitation between noise traders. If the tendency for noise traders to imitate their nearest neighbors increases up to a certain point called the “critical” point, all noise traders may place the same order (sell) at the same t...