A few drinks behind-Alcohol price and income elasticities in Europe: A microeconometric note

We provide new cross-country evidence on alcohol price and income elasticities based on microdata on individual behaviour. Our approach is original as previous research mainly estimates determinants of consumption with macroeconomic data. We use the latest available wave of the European Social Survey, 2014, merged with the Annual Database of National Beverage Consumption. We estimate a generalised Heckman model on the individual and national determinants of alcohol consumption with standard errors bootstrapped at the country level. We were able to identify direct and indirect effects of price and income, including their specific impacts on drinkers and abstainers.