The Devil is in the Details: Identifying Unbiased Link between Alcohol Purchasing Rights and Youth Delinquency

The minimum alcohol purchasing age in New Zealand was lowered from 20 to 18 in December 1999. Focusing on two distinct legislative regimes, we utilize a national-level census of all criminal convictions to examine the impact of unrestricted alcohol purchasing rights on alcohol-induced criminal behaviour. Our study reveals that overall trends in alcohol-related convictions are obscured by offenses that can only be prosecuted up to a certain age. After removing confounding influences from additional regulations that hold relevance under one legislative regime but not the other, we do not find a statistically meaningful increase in overall measures of alcohol-related crimes at the minimum legal alcohol purchasing age. The novel empirical findings from our study extend the geographic focus of the existing international literature on the social costs of gaining unrestricted access to alcohol.