In addition to investigating price effects among youths, researchers have studied price effects among other subgroups with a high risk of traffic accidents: binge drinkers and regular, heavy drinkers. Sloan and colleagues (1995) found that a 10 percent increase in the price of alcoholic beverages would decrease binge-drinking episodes (defined as consuming five or more drinks on one occasion in the past month) by eight percent. In addition, liability and insurance rules were more effective than criminal sanctions in reducing binge drinking. Another study found that persons who drank extremely heavily were unresponsive to price increases (Manning et al. 1995), suggesting that price increases would have a limited effect on traffic crashes among this group.
