We study how within-store price variation changes with inflation, and whether households exploit it to attenuate the inflation burden. We use micro price data for food products sold by 91 large multi-channel retailers in ten countries between 2018 and 2024. Measuring unit prices within narrowly...

In settings where most workers have full-time schedules, hourly wages are appropriate primary indicators of job quality and worker outcomes. However, in sectors where full-time schedules do not dominate - primarily service-producing activities - total hours matter, in addition to hourly wages,...

In this paper we study the relationship between cultural heritage and retail store dynamics at the neighbourhood level in the Netherlands. We analyze the total number of stores, number of vacant stores and number of stores by retail sub-industry in neighbourhoods, thereby focusing on the impact...

This paper explores the role of retailers as an urban amenity. Using data for Swedish rural and city municipalities for 2002-2008, "accessibility to shops" measures are constructed for the shops in the municipalities and in the hosting regions separately to examine the relationship between...

This paper investigates the determinants of the productivity of independent retail stores in Sweden by focusing on the impact of market size and regional hierarchy while controlling for several store and employee characteristics over time. The analysis utilizes Swedish store-level data for the...

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...

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...

Despite extensive research on retailers’ price responses to demand shocks, much less is known about their non-price adjustments. Using heterogeneity in timing, location, and magnitude of income/wealth shocks associated with the 2008 Great Recession, we explore how U.S. retail stores adjusted...

We examine changes in the retail sector in the US over the period 1999 to 2017. We show that while there were fewer physical stores in 2017 compared to the start of the period (consistent with the widely reported notion of a “retail apocalypse”), other indicators including employment, real...

This paper explores the widely-accepted view that Wal-Mart causes significant harm to the traditional, small 'mom and pop' business sector of the U.S. economy. We present the first rigorous econometric investigation of this issue by examining the rate of self-employment and the number of...