TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ashenfelter,Orley
AU  - Ciccarella,Stephen
AU  - Shatz,Howard J.
TI  - French Wine and the U.S. Boycott of 2003: Does Politics Really Affect Commerce?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13258
PY  - 2007
Y2  - July 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13258
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13258.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Orley C. Ashenfelter
Industrial Relations Section
Firestone Library
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ  08544
Tel: 609/258-4040
Fax: 609/258-2907
E-Mail: c6789@princeton.edu

Stephen Ciccarella
Public Policy Institute of California
500 Washington Street, Suite 800
San Francisco, CA 94111
E-Mail: ciccarella@ppic.org

Howard J. Shatz
RAND Corporation
1200 South Hayes Street
Arlington, VA 22202-5050
E-Mail: howard_shatz@rand.org
AB  - In early 2003, France actively tried to thwart the plans of the Bush administration to build international support for a war to depose Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. In response, calls in the United States for a boycott of French products, wine in particular, rebounded through all forms of media. In the spring of 2003, French business people even reported that the boycott calls were hurting their U.S. sales. Using a dataset of sales of nearly 4,700 individual wine brands, we show that there actually was no boycott effect. Rather, sales of French wine dipped for two reasons. First, they experience a cyclical peak at holiday time, from November through early January, and the boycott was called during the February to May period. Second, sales of French wine have been in a secular decline in the United States. Sales in February through May 2003 merely stayed on trend. We contrast our results with other recent work that has found evidence of a boycott effect but that omits the holiday effect from several specifications. French wine producers may be having economic problems, but it is not because of their government's foreign policy.
ER  -