Is changing the minimum legal drinking age an effective policy tool?

Abstract

In year 1991, regional governments in Spain started a period of implementation of a law that rose the minimum legal drinking age from 16 to 18years old. To evaluate the effects of this change on the consumption of legal drugs and its related morbidity outcomes, we construct a regional panel dataset on alcohol consumption and hospital entry registers and compare variation in several measures of prevalence between the treatment group (16-18years old) and the control group (20-22years old). Our findings show important differences by gender. Our main result regarding overall drinking prevalence shows a reduction of -21.37% for the subsample that includes males and females altogether. This effect on drinking is mainly driven by a reduction of -44.43% in mixed drinks and/or liquors drinking prevalence corresponding to the subsample of males. No causal effects regarding overall smoking prevalence and hospitalizations due to alcohol overdose or motor vehicle traffic accidents were found. To our knowledge, this is the first paper providing evidence on gender-based differences to policies aimed at reducing alcohol consumption. Our results have important policy implications for countries currently considering changes in the minimum legal drinking age.