EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Local Option, Alcohol and Crime

Stephen Billings

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2014, vol. 14, issue 3, 791-816

Abstract: With the end of National Prohibition in 1933, 30 states gave counties and municipalities the local option to continue alcohol restrictions. Currently, 10% of U.S. counties still maintain a ban on some or all alcohol. Since the Prohibition movement advanced on the association between alcohol use and criminal behavior, this research examines the impact of county-level alcohol restrictions on multiple types of crime across five U.S. states. Standard panel models show a positive relationship between local option policy changes to allow alcohol and crime. The novelty of this research involves comparing the impact of alcohol restrictions across crimes classified by the degree to which an offense is often committed under the influence of alcohol. Results highlight impacts across a number of crime categories with crimes commonly committed under the influence of alcohol as well as crimes involving drug use and even crimes associated with obtaining alcohol all increasing when counties allow the sale and consumption of alcohol.

Keywords: alcohol policy; local option; crime (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H7 K4 R5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2013-0040 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
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:bpj:bejeap:v:14:y:2014:i:3:p:26:n:7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2013-0040

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bpj:bejeap:v:14:y:2014:i:3:p:26:n:7