The impact on employment and hours of allowing sunday alcohol sales in Georgia

This paper uses the differential timing across counties of the removal of restrictions on Sunday alcohol sales in the state of Georgia to determine whether the change had an impact on employment and hours in the beer, wine, and liquor retail sales industry. A triple-difference analysis finds significant increases in average weekly hours in the treated industry in counties removing sales restrictions versus those that did not relative to other industries during the period of time the law took effect. Since there is no significant employment increase, it appears that employers adjusted to remaining open one additional day per week by increasing hours of existing employees rather than hiring additional workers.