As promised a year ago, I present to you a copy of my senior paper: Microbrew Consumption in the United States – research on blue laws and how they affect microbrew consumption. It could stand to have a significant amount of improvement as the math is, to put it mildly, weak. Limited data set availability as well as a very short period of time in which to do research made my job more difficult. My original intent was to expand my research efforts during graduate school but this won’t happen for some time due to the imminent arrival of one young James Tiberious Mills or Luke Skywalker Mills (we just can’t come to a consensus!).
If you’re reading this paper for the sheer pleasure of it (wtf?) the takeaway should be that blue laws are not a mechanism through which we should be promoting a diversity of consumption. While artificial scarcity or supply regulation can have interesting effects on a market, they are almost always detrimental to it. Colorado, my home state, has a strong brewing culture in spite of our blue laws, not because of them.
If you’re reading this paper as a part of a research project – where in some last ditch effort for data you stumbled upon this lonely corner of the web, then I should mention that I’m happy with the model, but unhappy with the availability of data. I’m very curious to see what happens when you run a regression with, say, 10 years worth of data on price, consumption, ABC info, etc. Please let me know if you or anyone you know is running with this kind of research as it’s very near and dear to my heart…and my liver.
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