中文摘要
我们研究俄罗斯反酗酒运动的长期影响，该运动在20世纪80年代末急剧改变了烈性酒与低度酒的相对供给。我们发现，这一政策使年轻男性在数十年后的长期偏好从烈性酒转向低度酒，并且我们估计了消费者形成其口味的年龄。我们表明，20世纪90年代末啤酒市场的大规模扩张对年轻消费者的口味产生了类似影响，而老年消费者的口味基本保持不变。随后，我们将这些饮酒模式的长期变化与男性死亡率的变化联系起来。从烈性酒向低度酒的转变大幅降低了狂饮的发生率，从而减少了与酒精相关的死亡。我们由此得出结论：由此造成的当前酒类消费份额上的巨大队列差异，可以解释近期男性死亡率下降的相当大一部分。模拟结果表明，由于消费者偏好的持续性变化，未来20年死亡率还将再下降23%。因此，仅关注同期效应的项目影响评估会严重低估此类改变商品偏好的公共政策的总效应。
Abstract
We study the long-run effects of Russia’s anti-alcohol campaign, which dramatically altered the relative supply of hard and light alcohol in the late 1980s. We find that this policy shifted young men’s long-run preferences from hard to light alcohol decades later, and we estimate the age at which consumers form their tastes. We show that the large beer market expansion in the late 1990s had similar effects on young consumers’ tastes, while older consumers’ tastes remained largely unchanged. We then link these long-run changes in alcohol consumption patterns to changes in male mortality. The shift from hard to light alcohol reduced incidences of binge drinking substantially, leading to fewer alcohol-related deaths. We conclude that the resulting large cohort differences in current alcohol consumption shares explain a significant part of the recent decrease in male mortality. Simulations suggest that mortality will continue to decrease by another 23 percent over the next 20 years due to persistent changes in consumer tastes. Program impact evaluations that focus only on contemporaneous effects can therefore severely underestimate the total effect of such public policies that change preferences for goods.