Peers and Alcohol: Evidence from Russia
Evgeny Yakovlev
No w0182, Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR)
Abstract:
For the last twenty years Russia has confronted the Mortality Crisis- the life expectancy of Russian males has fallen by more than five years, and the mortality rate has increased by 50%. Alcohol abuse is widely agreed to be the main cause of this change. In this paper, I use a rich dataset on individual alcohol consumption to analyze the determinants for heavy drinking in Russia, such as the price of alcohol, peer effects and habits. I exploit unique location identifiers in my data and patterns of geographical settlement in Russia to measure peers within narrowly-defined neighborhoods. The definition of peers is validated by documenting a strong increase of alcohol consumption around the birthday of peers. With natural experiments I estimate the own price elasticity of the probability of heavy drinking. This price elasticity is identified using variation in alcohol regulations across Russian regions and over time. From these data, I develop a dynamic model of heavy drinking to quantify how changes in the price of alcohol would affect the proportion of heavy drinkers among Russian males and subsequently also affect mortality rates. I find that that higher alcohol prices reduce the probability of being a heavy drinker by a non-trivial amount. An increase in the price of vodka by 50% would save the lives of at least 40,000 males annually. Peers account for a quarter of this effect.
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2012-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cefir.ru/papers/WP182.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Peers and Alcohol: Evidence from Russia (2012) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cfr:cefirw:w0182
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Babich (juliababich@gmail.com).