TOTM

The CARE Act and State Regulation of Alcohol Distribution: The Competitive and Social Effects of Post and Hold Laws

In an earlier post on the CARE Act, I highlighted the fact that the law would essentially immunize state laws regulating the distribution and sale of beer, wine and liquor wholesalers from challenge under the Commerce clause and the Sherman Act.  For more details on the CARE Act, see the earlier post, but the bottom line is that the CARE Act will put an end to successful challenges to anticompetitive state regulation protecting alcohol wholesalers such as the Costco v. Maleng or Granholm v. Heald.  In this post, I want to focus on a recent empirical research project that I undertook with FTC lawyer and economist James Cooper evaluating both the competitive effects and social harms from these state regulations of alcohol distribution.   For those who want to skip the background and get straight to the paper, here is the SSRN link to “State Regulation of Alcohol Distribution: The Effects of Post and Hold Laws on Output and Social Harms.”  The paper has also been released as part of the FTC Bureau of Economics working paper series.

Read the full piece here.