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Documents inThe unauthorized commercial use of Bank documents is prohibited and may be punishable under the Bank's policies and/or applicable laws.Copyright © Inter-American Development Bank. This working paper may be reproduced for any non-commercial purpose. It may also be reproduced in any academic journal indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, with previous consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. This paper attempts to evaluate the impact on crime of the restriction of late-night alcohol sales in Bogota and quantify the causal effect of problematic alcohol consumption on different crime categories. It is found that the restriction reduced deaths and injuries in car accidents and batteries. The results are stronger in areas where the restriction was actually binding and are highly heterogeneous depending on the number of liquor stores restricted at the block level. Finally, the paper measures the impact of the restriction on alcohol consumption (the first stage, or mechanism), and quantifies the causal pharmacological impact of alcohol consumption on crime using the restriction as an instrument for problematic alcohol consumption (the second stage). The results indicate that a one standard deviation (s.d.) increase in problematic alcohol consumption increases deaths and injuries in car accidents by 0.51 s.d and 0.82 s.d. respectively, and batteries by 1.27 s.d.
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JEL classifications: C2, C54, D04Keywords: Alcohol restrictions, Crime, Pharmacological channel 1 We thank the Corporación Andina para el Fomento (CAF) and the IDB Visiting Scholars Program for financial support for this paper. We wish to thank Adriana Camacho, Ximena Peña, Juan Fernando Vargas, Roman David Zárate, Angela Lulle, Ernesto Schargrodsky, Rodrigo Soares, Laura Chioda, Daniel Ortega, an anonymous referee and seminar participants at the IDB and UniAndes for their comments and suggestions that helped improved this paper significantly. Also, we thank Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP) for providing the crime data used in this paper. The usual disclaimer applies.2
