California beer price posting: An exploratory analysis of pricing along the supply chain

Abstract

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.