Introduction to the Issue

Abstract

Against the background of significant increases in campaign contributions from the wine industry to officials running for state offices, the author hypothesizes that wine-industry special interests influence state wine excise taxes. Drawing on state-level campaign contributions data, she finds statistical evidence that campaign contributions affect wine excise taxes and that wine excise taxes exhibit some degree of spatial dependence. "On average, the increases in campaign contributions from the wine industry in a state results in a decrease in wine excise taxes in the given state and its neighboring states." Building on a prior paper on the hedonics of fine water prices published in this Journal (Capehart, 2015), Kevin W. Capehart and Elena C. Berg analyze whether consumers can distinguish among different bottled waters in blind tastings in "Fine Water: A Blind Taste Test" (Capehart and Berg, 2018). They run various blind tasting experiments with about 100 subjects. One of their main findings is that subjects are not better than random at distinguishing various waters including tap water. When rating bottled waters and tap water, some subjects preferred the inexpensive tap water to the highly priced bottled waters. On average, more expensive waters were not rated higher than less expensive ones. In fact, the authors found the correlation between water rating and pricing to be slightly negative.