infonet-economy

This study is the first to analyze economic time series of one of the world’s most preeminent traditional events, the most popular beer festival, and the largest regular fair in the world: Munich Oktoberfest. Since people from around the world attend this cultural festival as of the first decades of the 20th century, it represents a unique opportunity to analyze elasticities of consumption both in the short and medium run (i.e. at business cycle frequencies) and in the
long-run. Against the backdrop of two secularly increasing demand factors –a rise in real disposable incomes and an increased amount of leisure– we use a novel data set to study elasticities of the consumption of beer and food and the revenues of breweries. To account for asymmetries we apply partial sum decompositions in an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to estimate elasticities for state, national, European and world GDP.