Long-Run Effects of Public Policies: Endogenous Alcohol Preferences and Life Expectancy in Russia

Lorenz Kueng and Evgeny Yakovlev

No w0219, Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR)

Abstract: We use two quasi-natural experiments in the 1980s and 1990s to identify how public policies affect important long-run outcomes by changing preferences. Large but short-lived shocks to product availability in Russia shifted young consumers' long-run preferences from hard to light alcohol. The resulting large cohort differences in current alcohol consumption shares decades after the interventions ended explain about 60% of the recent decrease in male mortality based on both micro-level and aggregate estimates. Mortality will continue to decrease by another 23% over the next twenty years based on our analysis. Program impact evaluations that focus only on contemporaneous effects can therefore severely underestimate the total effect of such public policies.

Keywords: long-run policy effects; endogenous preferences; mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 H31 I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-hea and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Long-Run Effects of Public Policies: Endogenous Alcohol Preferences and Life Expectancy in Russia (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cfr:cefirw:w0219

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