My new article, “Prohibition and Percolation: The Roaring Success of Coffee During US Alcohol Prohibition”, is now published in Southern Economic Journal. It’s the first statistical analysis of coffee imports and salience during prohibition. Other authors had speculated that coffee substituted alcohol after the 18th amendment, but I did the work of running the stats, creating indices, and checking for robustness.
My contributions include:
- National and state indices for coffee and coffee shops from major and local newspapers.
- A textual index of the same from book mentions.
- I uncover that prohibition is when modern coffee shops became popular.
- The surge in coffee imports was likely not related to trade policy or the end of World War I
- Both demand for coffee and supply increased as part of an intentional industry effort to replace alcohol and saloons.
- An easy to follow application of time series structural break tests.
- An easy to follow application of a modern differences in differences method for state dry laws and coffee newspaper mentions.
- Evidence from a variety of sources including patents, newspapers, trade data, Ngrams, naval conflicts, & Wholesale prices.
Generally, the empirical evidence and the main theory is straightforward. I learned several new empirical methods for this paper and the economic logic in the robustness section was a blast to puzzle-out. Finally, it was an easy article to be excited about since people are generally passionate about their coffee.
Bartsch, Zachary. 2025. “Prohibition and Percolation: The Roaring Success of Coffee During US Alcohol Prohibition.” Southern Economic Journal, ahead of print, September 22. https://doi.org/10.1002/soej.12794.
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