Barcode scanners were introduced in the 1970s as a way to reduce labor costs in stores, particularly at checkout. This paper is the first to estimate their effect on productivity. I use store-level data from the 1972, 1977, and 1982 Census of Retail Trade, matched to data on store scanner...

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...

I estimate the aggregate income elasticity of Wal-Mart's and Target's revenues using quarterly data for 1997-2006. I find that Wal-Mart's revenues increase during bad times, whereas Target's revenues decrease, consistent with Wal-Mart selling "inferior goods" in the technical sense of the term....

Wal-Mart is the largest company in the world, yet little is known about its economic impact. This essay discusses what is known about Wal-Mart's competitive advantage and its economic impact on local communities, as well as the national and global economy, and highlights the open questions to be...

We analyze the effect of Wal-Marts entry into the grocery market using a unique store-level price panel data set. We use OLS and two IV specifications to estimate the effect of Wal-Marts entry on competitors prices of 24 grocery items across several categories. Wal-Marts price advantage over...

This paper estimates the effect of Wal-Mart expansion on retail employment at the county level. Using an instrumental-variables approach to correct for both measurement error in entry dates and endogeneity of the timing of entry, I find that Wal-Mart entry increases retail employment by 100 jobs...

Retail chains and imports from developing countries have grown sharply over the past 25 years. Wal-Marts chain, which currently accounts for 10% of U.S. imports from China, grew 10-fold and its sales 90-fold over this period, while U.S. imports from China increased 30-fold. We relate these...

This note examines the instrumental variables method used by Neumark, Zhang, and Ciccarella (2005) to analyze Wal-Mart's effect on retail labor markets, and exposes major flaws in that methodology. Neumark, Zhang, and Ciccarella use an interaction between distance from Wal-Mart's headquarters...