Excess drinking is associated with lost productivity, accidents, disability, early death, crime, neglect of family responsibilities, and personality deterioration. These and related concerns have justified special restrictions on alcoholic-beverage commerce and consumption. The nature and extent...

Previous research has found strong evidence that legal access to alcohol is associated with sizable increases in criminality. We revisit this relationship using the census of judicial records on criminal charges filed in Oregon Courts, the ability to separately track crimes involving firearms,...

Teenage drinking is a top public health concern, generating social costs of over $28 billion per year, including substantial external costs associated with alcohol-related traffic fatalities. At the same time, the high rate of electronic cigarette ("e-cigarette") use among teenagers has become a...

We study the decentralization of liquor policies in the Post-Prohibition Era, which is the most famous natural experiment ever conducted with respect to policy decentralization in the U.S. Our empirical analysis exploits a unique feature of this policy change, namely that we observe votes of...

This paper examines the impact of Prohibition on alcohol consumption. Since data on both the price and quantity of alcohol are unavailable during the Prohibition period, it is not possible to estimate Prohibition's impact on either the supply or demand for alcohol. Assuming the existence of a...

This study focuses on the effects of variations in alcoholic beverage prices among states of the United States on violence on college campuses. The principal hypothesis tested is that the incidence of violence is negatively related to the price of alcohol. This hypothesis is derived from two...

Based on an analysis of the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, conducted between 1976 and 1980, we find that the frequency of the consumption of beer, the most popular alcoholic beverage among youths, is inversely related to the real price of beer and to the minimum legal...

We provide a critical review of research in economics that has examined causal relationships between alcohol use and crime. We lay out several causal pathways through which alcohol regulation and alcohol consumption may affect crime, including: direct pharmacological effects on aggression,...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of alcohol policies in reducing the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases among youth. Previous research has shown that risky sexual practices (e.g., unprotected sex and multiple partners) that increase the risk of contracting a STD are...

This paper uses state-level data on cirrhosis death rates to examine the impact of state prohibitions, pre-1920 federal anti-alcohol policies, and constitutional prohibition on cirrhosis State prohibitions had a minimal impact on cirrhosis, especially during the pre-1920 period. Pre-1920 federal...