This paper examines wine output and slave labor productivity in the Dutch and British Cape Colony, leveraging annual tax censuses. We document a substantial increase in wine production, but, despite substantial institutional changes over more than a century, we find surprisingly stable median wine yields. Exploiting the farm-level nature of our data, we observe increasing heterogeneity in wine yields, suggesting that some farmers were able to realize productivity increases. We show that efficient slave labor utilization was a critical driver of productivity enhancement, largely unaffected by external factors.

Using newly released public data on beer prices in the state of California, we construct a large dataset (approximately 2 million observations) that includes beer prices and packaging configurations. We merge this dataset with brewery attributes and county demographics to explore pricing differentials across California, the U.S.’s largest brewing state. We provide evidence of potential pricing-to-market conducted by macro breweries across the three-tier distribution system where craft breweries do not. In addition, we describe package attributes that exhibit price differentials across brewery types. We make the cleaned data available to the public and provide avenues for future research that may be addressed with this new data.

The impact of product ratings is significant in the experience goods market, whose intangible products are difficult to evaluate before consumption. Product ratings can reduce information asymmetries because they represent a credible signal of quality and thus positively affect product sales. In this study, we shed light on how professional critics behave by focusing on the influence of product characteristics and former reviews on rating behavior and market prices as additional quality signals in wine markets. Using 13,911 observations from professional wine tastings, we analyze 8,444 worldwide-produced wines and their ratings over 20 years. We find clear evidence to suggest that prices and product ratings are significantly related. Finally, the results suggest that review consistency evolves and determines current ratings.

We explore the impact of the 2013 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform on spatial price co-movements between the main European Union (EU) wine producer markets (i.e., Spain, France, and Italy). We consider monthly prices from January 2005 to January 2020 and R-Vine copula models, splitting the time period considered in December 2012 to track the changes in (1) the degree of integration, (2) the central markets, and (3) the potential asymmetries after the 2013 CAP reform. The results indicate an increasing overall price dependence from one sub-period to another, with Spain succeeding Italy as the central EU market. We also show asymmetry between Italy and France in the upper tail before 2013 and between Spain and France in the lower tail after 2013.