Based on the publicly available information on the data sources and methodology used by the Census Bureau to estimate e-commerce and physical retail sales, and based on detailed e-mail communications with the Census official responsible for the retail trade data, we found, in a version of this...

Among the most significant aspects of conducting a retail business are the costs, risks and liabilities associated with the retail site. Franchising injects a further level of complexity into the concept of a retailer trading from premises. The property interests in the retail site take many...

I address the degree to which variation in exposure to e-commerce is associated with entry and exit in the retail industry at the county level. To measure exposure to e-commmerce, I rely on within-state variation in relative search frequency for the phrase “amazon prime” as reported by...

In this note, we investigate the causal link between market concentration and markups in a retail setting. We study the Washington retail cannabis industry, which features exogenous variation in market concentration that resulted from retail licenses being awarded via lotteries. We observe...

This paper examines the effects of decentralizing decision-making in multi-establishment firms. Using a unique dataset from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), we assess the impact of allowing store managers to control the inventory replenishment decisions of their stores. We first...

How do firms' partnering strategies impact the size of their partner-based retail networks? We draw on agency theory to address this question in the context of franchising. Our econometric analyses, (based on nine years of longitudinal balanced panel data), include assessment of data...

In this paper we use a novel natural experiment where firms were randomly allocated differently sized retail chains to study the effects of firm scale and market concentration on outcomes for both firms and consumers. Beginning in 2014, Washington State used a lottery to allocate licenses to...

The last decade has witnessed an acceleration of retail foreign direct investment into a range of emerging markets across East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, led by a small cohort of food and general merchandise retailers from Western Europe, and to a lesser extent, North...

An extensive literature on the transformation of food retailing in developing countries by the expansion of supermarkets has highlighted the implications of the concentration of food value chains for the continued incorporation of small farmers in fresh produce supply. A critical examination of...

Aldi, the biggest discounter in Germany, started to systematically extend shopping hours of its stores in 2016. We interpret the decision to extend opening hours of a specific Aldi store as entry into a new market. By using a novel data set containing the opening hours of nearly all German...