Has Wal-Mart Buried Mom and Pop?: The Impact of Wal-Mart on Self Employment and Small Establishments in the United States

Saving traditional small ‘mom and pop’ businesses has been a justification for political and court decisions preventing Wal-Mart from opening new stores virtually everywhere across the United States. We present the first rigorous econometric investigation of how Wal-Mart actually impacts the small business sector. We examine the rate of self-employment and the number of smallemployer establishments using both time-series and cross-sectional data. Contrary to popular belief, our results suggest that the process of creative destruction unleashed by Wal-Mart has had no statistically significant long-run impact on the overall size and profitability of the small business sector in the United States.