In year 1991, regional governments in Spain started a period of implementation of a law that rose the minimum legal drinking age from 16 to 18 years old. To evaluate the effects of this change on the consumption of legal drugs and its related morbidity outcomes, we construct a regional panel dataset on alcohol consumption and hospital entry registers and compare variation in several measures of prevalence between the treatment group (16-18 years old) and the control group (20-22 years old). Our findings show important differences by gender. (...
