Retail Alcohol Availability and Product Diversity

Shuay-Tsyr Ho, Mingyang Qu, Bradley Rickard, Marco Costanigro (marco.costanigro@colostate.edu) and Edward McLaughlin

No 235913, 2016 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Boston, Massachusetts from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: The repeal of the Prohibition Act in 1933 introduced many state-specific regulations in alcohol markets. As one example of this, several states currently have laws that restrict specific alcoholic beverages in grocery stores, and some states have recently considered lifting these restrictions. Some opponents of such legislative changes claim that allowing alcohol to be more widely distributed would put smaller liquor stores out of business and eventually lead to a narrower set of product choices available to consumers. Here we use the Nielsen Homescan dataset that describes alcoholic beverage purchasing patterns for approximately 70,000 households between 2004 and 2012 to examine this issue empirically. Our results show that, even when controlling for preferences for variety, consumers in states that allow beer and wine sales in grocery stores have greater diversity in their purchases of beer and wine. Overall, the findings suggest that expanding the retail availability of beer and wine may actually increase the diversity of alcoholic beverage products purchased by consumers in those states.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Consumer/Household Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2016-05-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-com, nep-law and nep-mkt
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea16:235913

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.235913

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