Youth Alcohol Consumption, Traffic Accidents, and Mortality
Final Report Abstract
In many countries, excessive alcohol consumption among young people is widespread, despite the dangers associated with it. Policy makers around the world try to limit this excessive alcohol consumption among adolescents with different measures. The project therefore investigates the health effects for adolescents of two different alcohol policies in Germany. The first subproject focuses on the effects of the nighttime alcohol sales ban introduced in 2010 in Baden-Württemberg, while the second subproject deals with minimum legal drinking age regulations. Both subprojects draw on large administrative datasets and advanced methods to identify causal effects with observational data. The first subproject demonstrates that the nighttime alcohol sales ban is an effective measure to reduce extreme drinking behavior and alcohol-related health harms among young people. Although young people can easily and legally circumvent the nighttime sales ban, the ban reduces alcohol-related hospitalizations and doctor visits. However, there is no significant decrease in alcohol-related traffic accidents due to the nighttime alcohol sales ban. The second subproject finds that both the 16th and 18th birthdays are associated with a jump in death rates among young people. However, the subproject's findings suggest that this increase in deaths is not due to the legal access to certain alcoholic beverages associated with these age limits, but rather to the permission to obtain certain driver's licenses also associated with these age limits. Overall, the project shows that while (excessive) consumption of alcohol is an individual choice, government actions can effectively address the extent of excessive alcohol consumption.
Publications
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The Effects of Stepwise Minimum Legal Drinking Age Legislation on Mortality: Evidence from Germany. SSRN Electronic Journal (2019).
Kamalow, Raffael & Siedler, Thomas
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Health effects of a ban on late‐night alcohol sales. Health Economics, 32(1), 65-89.
Bäuml, Matthias; Marcus, Jan & Siedler, Thomas
