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Dry law and homicides: evidence from the São Paulo metropolitan area

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Author Info
Ciro Biderman (Escola de Economia de São Paulo, Fundação Getúlio Vargas.)
João Manoel Pinho de Mello () (Department of Economics PUC-Rio)
Alexandre A Schneider (Secretary of Education,Mayorship of São Paulo.)

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Abstract

Over the last 15 years, several Latin American cities have adopted dry laws, which restrain the sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants during specific hours of the week. Bogotá, in 1991, was the first. Several more have followed suit, or are likely to do so in the near future. Policy makers and the general press have argued that these measures reduce crime. In this paper, we use a particular feature of the adoption of laws in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area (SPMA) to estimate the effect of dry laws on the ultimate form of violent crime: murder. Between March 2001 and August 2004, 16 out of the 39 municipalities of the SPMA have adopted, at different dates, dry laws. By comparing the dynamics of homicide between adopting and non-adopting cities, we estimate that dry laws reduce homicides by at least 10%, with an even higher effect in high crime cities. Results are robust to inclusion of a large set of controls, to propensity score matching, to outliers, and to correction possible spillover effects from adopting to non-adopting cities.

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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics PUC-Rio (Brazil) in its series Textos para discussão with number 518.

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Length: 40p. JEL Code: I18, R58, Z00, K32
Date of creation: May 2006
Date of revision: Oct 2008
Handle: RePEc:rio:texdis:518

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Related research
Keywords: Dry Law; Alcohol; Crime; Difference-in-Difference;

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  4. Soares, Rodrigo R., 2006. "The welfare cost of violence across countries," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(5), pages 821-846, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Miron, Jeffrey A & Zwiebel, Jeffrey, 1995. "The Economic Case against Drug Prohibition," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(4), pages 175-92, Fall. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  9. Marcelo C. Medeiros & Alvaro Veiga, 2003. "Diagnostic Checking in a Flexible Nonlinear Time Series Model," Journal of Time Series Analysis, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 24(4), pages 461-482, 07. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Jeffrey A. Miron & Jeffrey Zwiebel, 1991. "Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition," NBER Working Papers 3675, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  11. João Manoel Pinho de Mello & Eduardo Zilberman, 2006. "Does crime affect economic decisions? An empirical investigation of savings in a high-crime environment," Textos para discussão 524, Department of Economics PUC-Rio (Brazil), revised Oct 2008. [Downloadable!]
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