Legal Access to Alcohol and Criminality

Benjamin Hansen and Glen Waddell ()

No 22568, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Previous research has found strong evidence that legal access to alcohol is associated with sizable increases in criminality. We revisit this relationship using the census of judicial records on criminal charges filed in Oregon Courts, the ability to separately track crimes involving firearms, and to track individuals over time. We find that crime increases at age 21, with increases mostly due to assaults lacking in premeditation, and alcohol-related nuisance crimes. We find no evident increases in rape or robbery. Among those with no prior criminal records, increases in crime are 50 percent larger; still larger for the most socially costly crimes of assault and drunk driving. This suggests that deterring criminality through increased punishments would likely prove difficult.

JEL-codes: H75 I1 I12 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
Note: EH PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Benjamin Hansen & Glen R. Waddell, 2017. "Legal Access to Alcohol and Criminality," Journal of Health Economics, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22568.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Legal access to alcohol and criminality (2018)
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:nbr:nberwo:22568

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22568

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().