Each of the world's largest retailers---Walmart, Carrefour, Tesco, and Metro---entered China after 1995. Their subsequent expansion in China may have influenced Chinese exports through two channels. First, they may have enhanced bilateral exports between the retailers' Chinese operations and...

I study the positive relationship between prices of tradable goods and per-capita income. I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and non-homothetic consumer preferences that positively links prices of tradables to consumer income....

We measure the effects of chain economies, business stealing, and heterogeneous firms' comparative advantages in the discount retail industry. Traditional entry models are ill-suited for this high-dimensional problem of strategic interaction. Building upon recently developed profit inequality...

We combine data on individual trade transactions from U.S. customs records with comprehensive information on firms' employment from the Census Bureau's business register to examine wholesalers and retailers in U.S. exports and imports. Exporters and importers with 100 percent employment in...

Do prices respond to macro shocks? Does the mere presence of international frontiers hinder trade? We revisit these questions by studying a dataset of online book prices for a number of US and Canadian retailers. We believe our dataset is well suited to this task for a number of reasons: (1)...

In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes' impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on...

While a fast-growing body of research has looked at how the advent and diffusion of e-commerce has affected prices, much less work has investigated e-commerce's impact on the number and type of producers operating in an industry. This paper theoretically and empirically takes up the question of...

This paper studies how prices comove across products, firms and locations to gauge the relative importance of retailer versus manufacturer-level shocks in determining prices. I make use of a large panel data set on prices for a cross-section of retailers in the U.S. I analyze prices at the...

The roll-out of Wal-Mart store openings followed a pattern that radiated from the center out with Wal-Mart maintaining high store density and a contiguous store network all along the way. This paper estimates the benefits of such a strategy to Wal-Mart, focusing on the savings in distribution...

Data on sales of memory modules are used to explore several aspects of e-retail demand. There is a strong relationship between e-retail sales to a given state and sales tax rates that apply to purchases from online retailers. This suggests that there is substantial substitution between online...