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Beer Taxation and Alcohol‐Related Traffic Fatalities
Author(s) -
Mast Brent D.,
Benson Bruce L.,
Rasmussen David W.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.1002/j.2325-8012.1999.tb00245.x
Subject(s) - enforcement , alcohol consumption , consumption (sociology) , economics , heavy drinking , variable (mathematics) , alcohol , law enforcement , demographic economics , public economics , econometrics , law , political science , mathematics , biochemistry , chemistry , mathematical analysis , social science , sociology
Most studies of alcohol‐related traffic fatalities find beer taxes to be an important policy variable. This is surprising since beer taxes only have a small impact on consumption and heavy drinkers are the least responsive to prices. This study shows that the tax relationship is not robust across data periods and that it reflects missing variable biases. While lack of control for law enforcement effort does not appear to bias tax coefficients, failure to include determinants of alcohol consumption other than taxes and drinking age and/or factors that simultaneously determine drinking behavior and political support for alcohol taxes apparently do.