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Journal of Health Economics

Underage Access to Alcohol and Its Impact on Teenage Drinking and Crime

Does underage access to alcohol increase teenage drinking and crime? To address this question, I leverage a discontinuity in legal access to alcohol at age 16 in Germany, a country with high consumption levels and a particularly early access regulation. Using detailed survey data and administrative crime records from 2005 to 2015, I detect considerable increases in drinking participation, frequency, and intensity at the legal cutoff along the middle and lower end of the distribution. These increases coincide with discrete jumps in criminal engagement under the influence of alcohol, mostly due to violent and property crimes. My findings suggest that changes in drinking intensity induce these crimes, implying a drinking-crime elasticity of 0.4 at age 16.

Dehos, F. (2022), Underage Access to Alcohol and Its Impact on Teenage Drinking and Crime. Journal of Health Economics, 81, 102555

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2021.102555