Australian minimum legal drinking age & effects later-in-life

Abstract

This thesis examines the long-run effects of Australia’s 1970s minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) reforms, which aligned all states to a uniform age of 18. While alcohol’s harms on adolescents are well-established, less is known about its level of persistence decades on. Using a staggered synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) framework and HILDA data, I estimate the impact of exposure to MLDA reform on a range of outcomes at ages 55 to 63. Large and highly significant effects are found for annual income (negative) and the prevalence of long-term health conditions (positive). However, a likely violation of the identifying assumption known as ’parallel trends’—driven by structural differences between treated and control states—means these estimates cannot be interpreted as causal. A novel contribution of this thesis is its focus on the long-run outcomes of MLDA policy in an Australian context, in contrast to existing literature which has largely examined short-run effects. Most importantly, however, the study highlights the challenges of using retrospective data to assess historical policy impacts, underscoring the need for caution in formulating research questions.