Alcohol advertising bans and alcohol abuse: reply

Abstract

Young reexamines the work first presented in Saffer (1991) on the relationship between alcohol advertising bans and alcohol use. While there are several interesting possibilities for extending Saffer (1991), Young fails to provide any new insights. Most of his paper is devoted to recreating my data and results. He tries to extend my work with three new specifications. Each of these new specifications is flawed. His errors include a inappropriate application of fixed effects models, inappropriate dependent variables, and incorrect serial correlation computations. The results of these errors are a series of inconsistent advertising ban coefficients. He concludes that these inconsistent results are evidence that advertising bans have no effect of alcohol abuse. It might be better to at least provide a series of consistent regression models before coming to any conclusions.