The impact of alcohol control policies on alcohol use and abuse among college students.

摘要

The study of alcohol demand among college aged populations is particularly interesting because of the traditional, social and cultural role which alcohol plays on most U.S. college campuses. The regular use and abuse of alcohol on many U.S. college campuses makes drinking a part of many students' daily environment. College student drinking is associated with several student, campus and location specific problems. Alcohol use and abuse on college premises is associated with injuries, violence, suicide, alcohol poisoning or overdosing, worsening grades and lower overall educational attainment.; A rich and unique data set, constructed from the 1993, 1997 and 1999 Harvard College Alcohol Study, is used to test the effectiveness of alcohol price and alcohol control policies on the drinking behaviors of a national sample of full-time college students. Drinking and binge drinking participation rates, the level of drinking, thirty day average alcohol consumption, the number of drinking occasions in the past thirty days and the number of drinks consumed per drinking occasion are estimated using a variety of econometric methods. Relative to data sets employed in prior analyses, this data contains detailed information on the drinking behaviors of college students, and includes unique information on alcohol prices as reported by individual students. This individual price information is aggregated into an average campus price per drink measure and is used to estimate the effects of campus specific prices on alcohol demand among college students. The survey data is merged with state level beer taxes as well as state and local alcohol control policy data. These variables help analyze the effects of alcohol regulatory efforts on alcohol use among college students.; This study makes one of the first attempts to model the effects of a large and multilevel spectrum of alcohol control policies on a college student sample. The findings of this study provide important information on the effectiveness of regulatory efforts in the alcohol market and offer important implications for the design and implementation of future regulatory alcohol control policies. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)