| dc.description.abstract | In this thesis, we examine how available cross-border shopping affects Vinmonopolet’s sales
volume and the affiliated loss of tax revenue. Leveraging COVID-19 border closures as an
exogenous shock, it employs an imputation-based differences-in-differences methodology
that offers a clean identification strategy for the causal effect of available cross-border
shopping. We utilize a constructed panel data set with weekly sales data from all 345
Vinmonopolet liquor stores over the period 2018–2022.
The results indicate cross-border alcohol shopping reduces overall Vinmonopolet sales
for treated outlets by 13%, reaching 48% for outlets within 45 minutes of Sweden.
Heterogeneous effects are found across four main alcohol categories; beer, wine, fortified
wine, and spirits. Total estimated tax revenue losses were NOK 871 million in 2019,
driven primarily by lower alcohol excise tax receipts. The findings have implications for
Norwegian alcohol policy and addressing the trade-off between public health goals and
mitigating tax leakage from cross-border shopping. Our estimates are robust using several
robustness checks. | en_US |
