“The Long-Run Impacts of Adolescent Drinking: Evidence from Zero Tolerance Laws”, 2024-02-16 ():
Adolescent exposure to Zero Tolerance Laws led to improvements in adult health.
The positive health effects are mirrored by improved labor market outcomes.
Increased labor market attachment at middle age implied annual gains of $18 billion.
Adolescent exposure to these laws led to declines in adult heavy alcohol consumption.
This paper provides the first long-run assessment of adolescent alcohol control policies on later-life health and labor market outcomes. Our analysis exploits cross-state variation in the rollout of “Zero Tolerance” (ZT) Laws, which set strict alcohol limits for drivers under age 21 and led to sharp reductions in youth binge drinking.
We adopt a difference-in-differences approach that combines information on state and year of birth to identify individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence and tracks the evolving impacts into middle age.
We find that ZT Laws led to statistically-significant improvements in later-life health. Individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence were substantially less likely to suffer from cognitive and physical limitations in their 40s. The health effects are mirrored by improved labor market outcomes.
These patterns cannot be attributed to changes in educational attainment or marriage. Instead, we find that affected cohorts were statistically-significantly less likely to drink heavily by middle age, suggesting an important role for adolescent initiation and habit-formation in affecting long-term substance use.
[Keywords: Zero Tolerance laws, disability, alcohol, labor market, long-run effects]