International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Ahead of Print.
Consumption of alcohol has an impact on violent crimes and homicides. The study examines the association between aggregate level consumption of spirit and homicide rates in the State of Kerala in India. Time-series analyses were conducted by building Autoregressive Moving Average with Exogenous Variables (ARMAX) models and OLS Regression models to explain the relationship between the monthly rate of consumption of alcoholic spirits and homicide rates. The study concludes that consumption of alcoholic spirits has a statistically significant impact on the total homicide rates and the male and female homicide rates. The study has significant policy implications being one of the first studies examining the relationship between alcohol consumption and homicide rates in India and suggesting methods to address challenges of adverse public health consequences associated with alcohol consumption.