The investigators estimated the potential results of a policy that would have equated the tax on the alcohol in beer to the tax on the alcohol in distilled spirits in 1951 and adjusted the tax for the rate of inflation since 1951. Such an increase would have resulted in a more than tenfold increase in the tax. The results implied that such a policy would have reduced the number of underage college women who drank in the past year by about 15 percent and the number of underage and older college women engaging in any binge drinking by roughly 20 percent. In contrast to these statistically significant negative effects of price on underage drinking and binge drinking by female students, no such effect was found for male students.
