Per capita retail consumption of fluid cow’s milk has declined steadily in North America and Europe. In the United States, that well-known decline accelerated in percentage terms in the past two decades as the market for plant-based substitutes surged. This paper documents and explains significant impacts of plant-based products on the retail prices and quantities of fluid cow’s milk products in the United States, using a discrete-choice model of milk product demand with random coefficients. Demand estimates show that plant-based milk is more substitutable for organic and lactose-free cow’s milk products than for conventional cow’s milk. Our simulation shows that the removal of plant-based milk products from the choice set would increase the retail quantity of organic cow’s milk by 18%, increase lactose-free cow’s milk by 14%, and increase conventional cow’s milk by 9%. The counterfactual simulation indicates that the absence of plant-based alternatives would increase annual U.S. fluid cow’s milk consumption by 1.6 gallons per capita, from 16.3 gallons to 17.9 gallons. The availability of plant-based milk was responsible for about one-third of the 5.1-gallon fall in annual per capita fluid cow’s milk consumption from 2006 to 2020. While plant-based milk continues to affect the demand for fluid cow’s milk products, especially the higher-priced organic and lactose-free products, it has not been the primary driver in the recent accelerated decline in the consumption of fluid cow’s milk.

This paper estimates the causal effects of the introduction of refrigerated almond milk on the prices and quantities of cow’s milk products and soymilk by exploiting the variation in the availability of refrigerated almond milk in retail stores induced by the staggered rollout across the United States from 2008 through 2010. With conditional parallel trend assumptions that account for the selection mechanism behind introduction timing, the empirical analysis uses recently developed econometric estimators to estimate the price and quantity effects of refrigerated almond milk. Using monthly retail store scanner data, we find that introducing almond milk soon reduced retail quantities of soymilk (3.6%) and lactose-free cow’s milk (3%), with smaller and statistically insignificant effects on organic cow’s milk (2%) and conventional cow’s milk (1%). Quantity projections through 2015 show a 23% reduction in soymilk and 10–14% for cow’s milk categories. Almond milk accounts for nearly half of the observed decline in soymilk quantity. 

This paper examines the responses of alcohol sales to temperature shocks and evaluates how a warming climate influences alcohol sales across the United States. Using retail store sales data from 2006 to 2023, combined with product-level alcohol content from a barcode database, we convert weekly sales volume into ethanol-equivalent volume for each store. We find that alcohol sales, on average, rise with temperature up to roughly 90°F, beyond which the positive effect becomes smaller. The effect varies sharply by region: warmer regions show much weaker responses to high temperatures than cooler regions, reflecting adaptation to hotter conditions. Climate projections indicate that, under high-emission scenarios, national alcohol sales are projected to decline by 2.5% by the end of the century, as sensitivity to hot days weakens. In warmer regions with more frequent hot days, the projected decline is nearly twice as large, reaching 4.7%.