Are Excise Taxes on Beverages Fully Passed Through to Prices? The Danish Evidence

This paper studies tax shifting of excise taxes on alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages in Denmark. We use a unique data set collected by Statistics Denmark focusing on six episodes of tax changes: three tax cuts and three tax hikes. We find that excise taxes on beer and soda are overshifted but those on liquor are undershifted. We also find that the pass-through is inversely related to the size of the tax change and that there are asymmetric effects of tax changes on soda. Finally, the tax pass-through on beer and soda is an increasing function of the distance to the German border.