Does the policy of setting a national drinking age reduce highway fatalities?

In Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Jeffrey Miron, senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University, talks about the research he and student Elina Tetelbaum (now a Yale Law student) carried out on that question:

What we find is that the only area where there is any evidence for efficacy of the law are states that adopted a higher drinking on their own without any compulsion. For the states that the feds forced … to raise [their] drinking age, there is no evidence of a beneficial reduction in traffic fatalities… We conclude quite strongly that it’s only when a state chooses a higher drinking age on its own, it’s only when it decides its going to devote enforcement resources and when there’s public sentiment to support that, that you see those sorts of beneficial effects.

Miron and Tetelbaum offer a more detailed look at their findings in the Spring issue of Cato’s magazine Regulation, which will be released March 26.