Alcohol advertising and alcohol consumption by adolescents

The purpose of this paper is to empirically estimate the effects of alcohol advertising on adolescent alcohol consumption. The theory of brand capital is used to explain the effects of advertising on consumption. The industry response function and the evidence from prior studies indicate that the empirical strategy should maximize the variance in the advertising data. The approach in this paper to maximizing the variance in advertising data is to employ cross sectional data. The Monitoring the Future (MTF) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) data sets, which include only data for adolescents, are employed for the empirical work. These data sets are augmented with alcohol advertising data, originating on the market level, for five media. Use of both the MTF and the NLSY97 data sets improves the empirical analysis since each data set has its own unique advantages. The large size of the MTF makes it possible to estimate regressions with race and gender specific subsamples. The panel nature of the NLSY97 makes it possible to estimate individual fixed effects models. In addition, very similar models can be estimated with both data sets. Since the data sets are in