Minimum pricing or volumetric taxation? Quantity, quality and competition effects of price regulations in alcohol markets

Celine Bonnet; Fabrice Etile; Sebastien Lecocq

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2509.14116

Minimum pricing or volumetric taxation? Quantity, quality and competition effects of price regulations in alcohol markets

Celine Bonnet·Fabrice Etile·Sebastien Lecocq

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Reforming alcohol price regulations in wine-producing countries is challenging, as current price regulations reflect the alignment of cultural preferences with economic interests rather than public health concerns. We evaluate and compare the impact of counterfactual alcohol pricing policies on consumer behaviors, firms, and markets in France. We develop a micro-founded partial equilibrium model that accounts for consumer preferences over purchase volumes across alcohol categories and over product quality within categories, and for firms' strategic price-setting. After calibration on household scanner data, we compare the impacts of replacing current taxes by ethanol-based volumetric taxes with a minimum unit price (MUP) policy of 0.50 Euro per standard drink. The results show that the MUP in addition to the current tax outperforms a tax reform in reducing ethanol purchases (-15% vs. -10% for progressive taxation), especially among heavy drinking households (-17%). The MUP increases the profits of small and medium wine firms (+39%) while decreasing the profits of large manufacturers and retailers (-39%) and maintaining tax revenues stable. The results support the MUP as a targeted strategy to reduce harmful consumption while benefiting small and medium wine producers. This study provides ex-ante evidence that is crucial for alcohol pricing policies in wine-producing countries.

Explore related subjects

econ.GN q-fin.EC

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Celine Bonnet, Fabrice Etile, Sebastien Lecocq. 2025-09-17. Minimum pricing or volumetric taxation? Quantity, quality and competition effects of price regulations in alcohol markets. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14116

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Local Media and the Shaping of Social Norms: Evidence from the Ebola outbreak

Media's influence on norms and behavior is widely recognized. Less is known about the role played by media being local. I examine this in a high-stakes context, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea. I exploit quasi-random variation in access to radio and the timing of a public-health campaign aired on community radio. I find that 12-17% of Ebola cases could have been prevented if places with access to a neighboring community radio station had instead had their own. Impacts are driven by radio being local rather than by ethno-linguistic belonging. Local media facilitates coordination in behaviors observed and sanctioned locally.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Productivity Shocks and Input Misallocation: A Decomposition

This paper asks how much input misallocation productivity uncertainty generates and at which stage of input decisions it arises. I separate revenue productivity by when each component is revealed and trace each into the gap between an input's marginal revenue product and its price. In six European countries, shocks revealed after an input is committed account for 20 percent of capital gap dispersion and 5 percent of labor gap dispersion. An unanticipated one percent rise in productivity raises the capital gap by 0.92 percent and the labor gap by 0.19 percent, because most of the shock passes into the wage.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

When Do Type-Specific Wages Buffer Distributional Incidence in TANK?

When do relative wages buffer the unequal incidence of aggregate shocks? I derive a consumption-gap decomposition and a present-value condition for partial offset in a TANK model. An extension separates wage-setting demand elasticity from substitution between labor segments and allows each segment to contain both financial types. With a zero inherited wage gap and a same-sign discounted wedge, substitution above one gives offsetting earnings reallocation; substitution below one gives amplification. The channel disappears when financial types have identical segment exposure. Numerical experiments assess these mechanisms, shock persistence, policy feedback, and aggregate-IRF matching. In the nested perfect-alignment monetary benchmark, the peak consumption gap is about two-fifths smaller under type-specific wages than under the common-wage closure. These are conditional model comparisons, not empirical effect estimates or welfare rankings.

econ.GN↗