Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had to rapidly implement lockdown policies that restricted human mobility to suppress the spread of the disease and reduce mortality. Although this intervention was successful in saving lives, it delivered a serious shock to the economy and decimated...

We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to attract retailing. We find that total retail employment is not significantly affected by local sales tax rates, but employment in big box and anchor...

State and federal minimum wage hikes are likely to impact the retail industry employing a great number of less well-compensated part-time workers. Despite the relevance of this issue, it is not clear how minimum wage increases affect full-time and part-time retail employees differentially. In...

Using an administrative payroll dataset for 2.6 million retail workers, we find that the staggered rollout of a major e-commerce firm's fulfillment centers reduces traditional retail workers' income in geographically proximate counties by 2.4%. Wages of hourly workers, especially part-time...