Breaking the Link Between Legal Access to Alcohol and Motor Vehicle Accidents: Evidence from New South Wales

A large literature has documented signicant public health benets associated with the minimum legal drinking age in the United States, particularly because of the resulting eects on motor vehicle accidents. These benets form the primary basis for continued eorts to restrict youth access to alcohol. It is important to keep in mind, though, that policymakers have a wide variety of alcohol-control options available to them, and understanding how these policies may complement or substitute for one another can improve policy making moving forward. Towards this end, we propose that investigating the causal eects of the minimum legal drinking age in New South Wales, Australia provides a particularly informative case study, because Australian states are among the world leaders in their eorts against drunk driving. Using an age-based regression-discontinuity design applied to restricted-use data from several sources, we nd no evidence that legal access to alcohol has eects on motor vehicle accidents of any type in New South Wales, despite having large eects on drinking and on hospitalizations due to alcohol abuse.