This paper documents and explains the recent rise of "big-box" general merchandisers. Data from the Census of Retail Trade for 1977-2007 show that general-merchandise chains grew much faster than specialist retail chains, and that general merchandisers that added the most stores also made the...

We study the effect of increases in state minimum wages on the prices of several fast-food items using quarterly city-level data from 1993-2012, a period during much of which the federal minimum wage declined in real value while state-level legislation flourished. For two products, burgers and...

Barcode scanners, introduced in the early 1970s, were a foundational process innovation in the grocery supply chain. By 1984 scanners had been installed in 10% of food stores in the U.S. Difference-in-difference analysis of city-level price data shows that scanners reduced prices of groceries by...

We use hurricane Katrina's damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a capital-destruction shock. We find very high exit rates for businesses that incurred physical damage, particularly for small firms and less-productive...

If child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents' concern for the household's survival, the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force. However, this assumption about parental decision making, coupled with the...