Department of Economics

There is recent evidence that Ride-Hailing applications reduce the number of alcohol-related motor vehicle collisions and fatalities. This paper aims to investigates how they may impact the restaurant and bar industry by estimating a difference-in-differences model across cities in California. Results suggest an average increase of $36 in quarterly per capita restaurant and bar revenue. This result is robust to model validation where the three largest cities are separately excluded from the model. Additional robustness checks do not provide any evidence that the parallel trends assumption is violated.