Prohibition found to have boosted longevity by limiting fetal alcohol exposure

This paper by Noghanibehambari and Fletcher is one of the first to study whether bans of alcohol sales and consumption in US counties during the time of the temperance movement and Prohibition in the early twentieth century led to increased longevity. The authors theorized that banning alcohol limited how much pregnant women drank, thereby improving babies’ health at birth in a way that led to living longer lives decades later. The staggered implementation of statewide and federal laws prohibiting alcohol use that occurred between 1900 and 1930 provided the authors with a natural experiment, enabling them to compare the old-age longevity of individuals who were exposed to these laws during early life with that of those who were not.

For their investigation, the authors used the Social Security Administration Death Master Files, which were linked to the full-count 1940 census. From this they could get information about male deaths between the years 1975 and 2005, including age at death, date of birth, and parental and individual characteristics. And since their analysis focused on in utero and childhood exposure, they needed information on county of birth or residence during childhood. To infer this, they searched each individual in historical censuses between 1910 and 1930, using historical census linking rules, “to get county information in the first decennial census that each individual appears and use it as the county of birth/childhood.” In addition, the authors used data from the study, Prohibition Movement in the United States, 1801-1920 (ICPSR 8343). It contains information, gleaned from historical literature and state archives, on the prohibition status of each county and state in the continental US from 1801 to 1920. It also includes indicators of whether a county was “involuntarily dry” (due to state law) or “voluntarily dry” (via local referenda). (The authors extended the dataset by adding 10 years of data up to 1930.) After conducting analyses that took into consideration a wide range of covariates and fixed effects, Noghanibehambari and Fletcher found that men born in counties that banned alcohol lived almost two years longer on average compared to men from counties that did not ban alcohol sales. While more research is needed, this study suggests laws that restricted alcohol availability in the past may have improved health and increased life spans for future generations.