| Abstract: | 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. |
