The alcohol industry argues that alcohol excise taxes do not reduce heavy drinking because of substitutions to lower … increases in alcohol excise taxes reduce heavy alcohol consumption. Using data from the Nielsen Homescan we investigate the … effects of a large excise tax increase that raised alcohol prices. The results show that heavy drinkers reduce purchases, and …

We show that tax-induced increases in alcohol prices can lead to substantial substitution and avoidance behavior that … limits reductions in alcohol consumption. Causal estimates are derived from a natural experiment in Illinois where spirits … construct representative and consistent measures of alcohol prices and sales from scanner data collected for hundreds of …