eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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The aim of this study is to find how municipal crime levels changed in Finland in relation to the municipal alcohol availability during the years 1960-1975. The main focus is in the legislative change known as Keskiolutlaki (enforced in 1969), which liberated the retail sales of medium-strength beer across the land and ended the prohibition-like conditions that existed in the rural municipalities. The study of this subtle relationship between alcohol and crime is done with regression analysis. Furthermore, tools such as fixed effects, differences-in-differences and Poisson regression are used in distinguishing this relationship. Before the regressions, I review the legislative change in a historical perspective, its implications to alcohol consumption and previous studies on how alcohol availability affects consequent crime rates.

The main dependent variables of this study are overall crime, traffic crime, other crime, drunk arrests (which means drunk and disorderly conduct), batteries and 'fatal offences and attempts at these'. The main independent variables reflect the municipal-level alcohol supply in the consequent years. The crime levels are population adjusted (or exposed to the population in Poisson regressions). In order to further distinguish between how alcohol supply affected different municipalities' crime levels after the legislative change, a quasi-experimental, differences-in-differences -based research setup is used. The treatment and control groups are formed according to the placement of Alko stores, which the most distinct form of alcohol supply in Finland

The spatial availability of alcohol supply can be seen to significantly influence arrests regarding more precise study: More time-invariant variables especially regarding socioeconomic and- demographic municipal differences and more accurate estimates on how the alcohol supply and