The Long-Run Effects of a Public Policy on Alcohol Tastes and Mortality
Journal: National Bureau of Economic Research
Year: 2014

We study the long-run effects of Russia's anti-alcohol campaign, which dramatically altered the relative supply of hard and light alcohol in the late 1980s. We find that this policy shifted young men's long-run preferences from hard to light alcohol decades later and we estimate the age at which consumers form their tastes. We show that the large beer market expansion in the late 1990s had similar effects on young consumers' tastes, while older consumers' tastes remained largely unchanged. We th