The minimum alcohol purchasing age in New Zealand was lowered from 20 to 18 in December 1999. Focusing on two distinct legislative regimes, we utilize a national-level census of all criminal convictions to examine the impact of unrestricted alcohol purchasing rights on alcohol-induced criminal behaviour. Our study reveals that overall trends in alcohol-related convictions are obscured by offenses that can only be prosecuted up to a certain age. After removing confounding influences from additional regulations that hold relevance under one legislative regime but not the other, we do not find a statistically meaningful increase in overall measures of alcohol-related crimes at the minimum legal alcohol purchasing age. The novel empirical findings from our study extend the geographic focus of the existing international literature on the social costs of gaining unrestricted access to alcohol.

中文翻译：

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魔鬼在细节中：确定酒精购买权与青少年犯罪之间的公正联系*

新西兰的最低酒类购买年龄于 1999 年 12 月从 20 岁降低到 18 岁。针对两个不同的立法制度，我们利用全国范围内所有刑事定罪的人口普查来检查不受限制的酒类购买权对酒类诱发犯罪的影响行为。我们的研究表明，与酒精有关的定罪的总体趋势被只能在一定年龄内被起诉的罪行所掩盖。在消除了在一种立法制度下具有相关性但在另一种立法制度下具有相关性的其他法规的混杂影响后，我们没有发现在最低法定酒精购买年龄时与酒精相关的犯罪的总体衡量指标在统计​​上有意义的增加。