Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2010, 7 4. Conclusions 1909 Women not only are more vulnerable than men to alcohol’s effects, but also can pass on adverse consequences of alcohol use to the developing fetus if they drink while pregnant [33]. This study examines the relationships between increased alcohol taxes, pregnant women’s drinking behaviors, and infant health. Unlike tobacco taxes, which vary based largely on public health concerns, state changes in alcohol taxation have tended to be made for more clearly financial reasons; public health benefits, in the absence of a state budget deficit, are not sufficient incentives for a state to raise alcohol taxes [34]. The key findings from this study show that any one-cent increase in alcohol taxes decreases the prevalence of LBW by 0.1~2% points. Since our estimates are based on census data, which include 70 million babies, the results indicate that up to 98,000 fewer babies would have been born at LBW over these years had there been a one-cent increase in alcohol taxes, based on the mean of effects of beer taxes. Since LBW is related to other health and socio-educational consequences for children, raising alcohol taxes could confer significant public health and associated benefits. Findings also show that quantity and binge drinking participation are sensitive to alcohol prices (particularly, as related to liquor taxes) among pregnant women, and that these elasticities are larger than those for the general population. To assure robustness of our findings, we utilized taxes for the pre-and-post-conception years, respectively, in our models. Magnitudes of all coefficients became 100 times smaller with no significance so that the identification assumption is correct. Results are available upon request. The primary limitation of this study is that it remains unclear whether the mechanism by which increased alcohol taxes predict infant health occurs solely through a reduction of binge drinking; unfortunately, no single dataset includes reliable information on both birth outcomes and drinking during pregnancy. Nevertheless, the estimates drawn from the national representative data from BRFSS confirm that lower drinking prevalence, especially heavy drinking, during pregnancy is an important factor that contributes to better birth outcomes. Future work should address whether this relationship is causal, perhaps through development of a dataset with both birth outcomes and drinking together. Acknowledgements The author thanks two anonymous reviewers, John Cawley, Curtis Florence, George Jakubson, Donald Kenkel, Jordan Matsudaira, Kosali Simon, Peter Veazie, Byung-Kwang Yoo and Douglas Young for helpful suggestions and discussion, and Philip Cook for kindly sharing alcohol taxes data. Thanks also go to Dr. Ann Russ for scientific proofreading and editing the manuscript. References 1. 2. 3. Eriksson, M.; Larsson, G; Zetterstrom, R. Abuse of alcohol, drugs and tobacco during pregnancy—consequences for the child. Pediatrician 1979, 8, 228-242. Abel, E.L.; Hannigan, J.H. Maternal risk factors in fetal alcohol syndrome. Neurotoxicol. Teratol. 1995, 17, 445-462. Almond, D.; Chay, K.; Lee, D. The costs of low birth weight. Q. J. Econ. 2005, 120, 1031-1083.