Raising Legal Drinking Age To 21 Did Not Save Lives Or Reduce Teen Drinking

Raising the minimum legal drinking age to 21 years old did not saves live or significantly affect teenage drinking.

See NBER paper:

Does the Minimum Legal Drinking Age Save Lives? by Jeffrey Miron & Elina Tetelbaum, Economic Inquiry, April 2009, Pages 317-336 (gated).

From the article abstract:

State-level panel data for the past 30 yr show that any nationwide impact of the MLDA [minimum legal drinking age] is driven by states that increased their MLDA prior to any inducement from the federal government. Even in early-adopting states, the impact of the MLDA did not persist much past the year of adoption. The MLDA appears to have only a minor impact on teen drinking.