The Long-Run Effects of a Public Policy on Alcohol Tastes and Mortality

Lorenz Kueng and Evgeny Yakovlev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2021, vol. 13, issue 1, 294-328

Abstract: We study the long-run effects of Russia's anti-alcohol campaign, which dramatically altered the relative supply of hard and light alcohol in the late 1980s. We find that this policy shifted young men's long-run preferences from hard to light alcohol decades later, and we estimate the age at which consumers form their tastes. We show that the large beer market expansion in the late 1990s had similar effects on young consumers' tastes, while older consumers' tastes remained largely unchanged. We then link these long-run changes in alcohol consumption patterns to changes in male mortality. The shift from hard to light alcohol reduced incidences of binge drinking substantially, leading to fewer alcohol-related deaths. We conclude that the resulting large cohort differences in current alcohol consumption shares explain a significant part of the recent decrease in male mortality. Simulations suggest that mortality will continue to decrease by another 23 percent over the next 20 years due to persistent changes in consumer tastes. Program impact evaluations that focus only on contemporaneous effects can therefore severely underestimate the total effect of such public policies that change preferences for goods.

JEL-codes: D12 H25 H31 I12 I18 L66 P36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Working Paper: The Long-Run Effects of a Public Policy on Alcohol Tastes and Mortality (2014)
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DOI: 10.1257/pol.20180439

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