Because a variety of crimes are related to alcohol use and abuse (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1988), numerous studies have assessed the influences of changes in alcohol prices on crime rates. For example, Cook and Moore (1993) examined the impact of per capita alcohol consumption and beer excise taxes on violent crime rates (i.e., homicides, assaults, rapes, and burglaries), using annual State-level data obtained from the 1979 through 1987 Uniform Crime Reports. Employing fixed-effects models, in which the only independent variable other than State and year indicators was the beer tax, the investigators concluded that higher beer taxes would lead to significant reductions in rapes and robberies but would have little impact on homicides and assaults. These findings are generally confirmed by an analysis of homicide rates obtained from the Vital Statistics data, which also concluded that higher alcoholic beverage prices and reduced alcohol availability would lower homicide rates (Sloan et al. 1994).
