Type:
Event

SITE Seminar | Sleepless nights, safer roads? Night-time air alerts and behavioral risk avoidance

Join us for the next SITE Seminar! On April 21, 2026, we welcome Dariia Mykhailyshyna to present new evidence from Ukraine on how exposure to night-time air alerts affects next-day traffic safety. Using administrative data from Lviv (2022–2024), the study disentangles fatigue-related impairment from threat-induced risk avoidance and shows how acute danger can shift everyday behavior in measurable ways.

Working paper title: Sleepless Nights, Safer Roads? Night-time Air Alerts and Behavioral Risk Avoidance

By: Dariia Mykhailyshyna

This paper estimates the effect of night-time air alert exposure on next-day traffic accidents using daily administrative data from Lviv, Ukraine, over 2022-2024. Air alerts signal genuine aerial threats, bundling sleep disruption with exposure to acute danger and creating competing channels: fatigue impairment versus threat-induced risk aversion. Exploiting variation in alert timing that is unanticipated by local residents, I find that each additional hour of night alert reduces full-day accidents by 10 percent, with effects concentrated in the afternoon and evening. These reductions are driven by behavioral risk avoidance on two margins: fewer discretionary trips and lower conditional accident risk. Accident cause analysis shows that fatigue-sensitive causes are unchanged while risky-behavior causes decline significantly - the opposite of what the fatigue hypothesis predicts. The risk avoidance response was strongest in 2022 and attenuated in subsequent years, consistent with adaptation to recurring war threats.

AI-generated illustration created with ChatGPT.