The Long-Term Effects of Increasing the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Organ Failure

• In Event: Unintended Consequences and Tradeoffs in Substance Use Policy

Abstract

Many states raised the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) to 21 between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s to reduce alcohol-related accidents. We use the variation created by the timing of the adoption of this policy to investigate how early exposure to alcohol affects organ failure in the long run. We merge the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network data in the period of 2010-2019 with the Census and employ an event-study research design to estimate the effects of exposure to this policy in young adulthood on the demand for organ transplantation a few decades later. Our paper is the first to provide evidence that limited access to alcohol and spirits before the age of 21 lowered the demand for transplantation of livers, kidneys and pancreas. Increasing the MLDA for alcohol in general lowered the demand for livers and kidneys by 20-25 per 100,000 populations and the demand for any organ transplants by 50-60 per 100,000 population. Our results also indicated that higher MLDA for spirits caused an even larger reduction in the demand for organ transplantation. The results are robust to a number of alternative specifications and the research design passes a placebo test for the random timing of the policy.

Author

• Minh Nguyen, Ball State University
  Presenting Author