Johansson Per, Pekkarinen Tuomas, Verho Jouko
IFAU and Department of Economics, Uppsala University and IZA, Sweden.
Government Institute for Economic Research (VATT) and IZA, Finland.
J Health Econ. 2014 Jul;36:125-36. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2014.04.002. Epub 2014 Apr 18.
This paper studies the cross-border health and productivity effects of alcohol taxes. We estimate the effect of a large cut in the Finnish alcohol tax on mortality, alcohol-related illnesses and work absenteeism in Sweden. This tax cut led to large differences in the prices of alcoholic beverages between these two countries and to a considerable increase in cross-border shopping. The effect is identified using differences-in-differences strategy where changes in these outcomes in regions near the Finnish border are compared to changes in other parts of northern Sweden. We use register data where micro level data on deaths, hospitalisations and absenteeism is merged to population-wide micro data on demographics and labour market outcomes. Our results show that the Finnish tax cut did not have any clear effect on mortality or alcohol-related hospitalisations in Sweden. However, we find that workplace absenteeism increased by 9% for males and by 15% for females near the Finnish border as a result of the tax cut.
本文研究了酒精税的跨境健康和生产力影响。我们估计了芬兰大幅削减酒精税对瑞典死亡率、与酒精相关的疾病以及旷工情况的影响。这次减税导致了这两个国家酒精饮料价格的巨大差异，并使跨境购物大幅增加。我们采用双重差分法来确定这种影响，即将芬兰边境附近地区这些结果的变化与瑞典北部其他地区的变化进行比较。我们使用登记数据，将死亡、住院和旷工的微观层面数据与人口统计学和劳动力市场结果的全人口微观数据合并。我们的结果表明，芬兰的减税对瑞典的死亡率或与酒精相关的住院情况没有任何明显影响。然而，我们发现，由于减税，芬兰边境附近男性的工作场所旷工率增加了9%，女性增加了15%。
