Starting around 1996, Russia witnessed a strong growth in beer consumption, leading to a fivefold growth in average beer consumption and making beer the most important alcoholic drink today. We use survey data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to analyze individual...

The present-day border between Belgium and the Netherlands traces back to the separation of the Low Countries after the Dutch Revolt (1566-1648) against Spanish rule. The capacity to finance war expenditures played a central role in the outcome of this conflict. Excise taxes on beer consumption...

Retailers’ private standards are increasingly important in addressing consumer concerns about safety, quality and social and environmental issues. Empirical evidence shows that these private standards are frequently more stringent than their public counterparts. This article develops a...

Almost half of the world’s vineyards are in the EU and the EU produces around 60% of the world’s wine. The EU is also the world’s most regulated wine market. In 2007, the European Union decided on a major reform of its wine policy, the so-called Common Market Organization (CMO) for wine. A...

We provide the first quantitative analysis to scrutinize the ample ethnographic evidence that magico-religious beliefs affect the demand for conventional healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa. We rely on the unique case of Benin, where Voodoo-adherence is freely reported, and varies greatly within...

We examine the impact of a different cultural background on individual behavior, focusing on violence on the football field of southern European and nothern European football players in the English Premier League. We find that southern European football players collect on average more football...

The EU wine market is heavily regulated. Despite the many distortions in the wine market as a consequence, reforming the regulations has proven difficult. This paper analyses the political economy mechanism that created the existing set of wine regulations. We document the historical origins of...

As recently as a century ago, one out of two people in Europe was employed in the agricultural sector. Today agriculture represents only a small fraction of total employment in most EU member states. What makes this decline in agricultural employment even more striking is that this evolution has...

This paper provides microeconomic evidence on food security impacts of privately organized biofuel outgrower schemes in Ethiopia. We conducted a household and community level survey and evaluated the impact of castor bean farming. We use endogenous switching regressions to analyze the impact on...

During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food...