One Markup to Rule Them All: Taxation by Liquor Pricing Regulation
研究了酒类统一加价率政策如何通过影响不同产品的定价，间接实现收入再分配，发现该政策对低收入和低教育水平居民有利，同时增强了小型专业企业的市场力量。
Commodity taxation often involves uniform tax rates. We use alcohol laws that tax differentiated spirits with a comprehensive uniform markup to evaluate redistribution generated by such simple tax policy. We document preference heterogeneity among consumers, variation in product demand elasticities, and market power among producers with heterogeneous product portfolios. Relative to more flexible product-level markups recognizing demand heterogeneity and strategic price responses of firms, we find that the uniform markup underprices less elastic spirits, implicitly subsidizing low-income and less educated residents. The uniform markup grants additional market power to small specialized firms whose product positioning benefits from the policy.