Seminars

◈ 주   제 :  Policy Decentralization in the Post-Prohibition Era
◈ 발표자 :  Holger Sieg (UPenn)
◈ 일   시 : 2025년 3월 12일 수요일 16:30 ~ 17:45
◈ 장   소 : 우석경제관(223동) 405호
◈ 주   관 : 경제학부, 경제연구소 한국경제혁신센터, SSK, BK21

Policy Decentralization in the Post-Prohibition Era

Abstract:

We study the decentralization of liquor policies in the Post-Prohibition Era. We have systematically collected new roll call voting data for this historical period for the Texas legislature. Combining this unique new data set with data on vote shares in local liquor referenda, we can jointly analyze legislators’ roll-call voting and their constituents’ voting in referenda on the same salient policy issue. We develop and estimate a probabilistic voting model that allows for spillovers and peer effects in the determination of policy preferences. We find that there was much heterogeneity in preferences among legislators and voters, which is consistent with a high degree of political polarization during this era. Our estimates also suggest that these spillover effects are small. Our model predicts that there are large potential gains from decentralization. Using historical data on alcohol consumption during Prohibition from Warburton (1932) allows us to map the estimates in the policy space into an alcohol consumption space and compute more traditional welfare measures such as consumer surplus.