The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets

We estimate the effects of Wal-Mart stores on county-level retail employment and earnings, accounting for endogeneity of the location and timing of Wal-Mart openings that most likely biases the evidence against finding adverse effects of Wal-Mart stores. We address the endogeneity problem using a natural instrumental variables approach that arises from the geographic and time pattern of the opening of Wal-Mart stores, which slowly spread out from the first stores in Arkansas. The employment results indicate that a Wal-Mart store opening reduces county-level retail employment by about 150 workers, implying that each Wal-Mart worker replaces approximately 1.4 retail workers. This represents a 2.7 percent reduction in average retail employment. The payroll results indicate that Wal-Mart store openings lead to declines in county-level retail earnings of about $1.2 million, or 1.3 percent. Of course, these effects occurred against a backdrop of rising retail employment, and only imply lower retail employment growth than would have occurred absent the effects of Wal-Mart.Wal-Mart; Employment

The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets

We estimate the effects of Wal-Mart stores on county-level retail employment and earnings, accounting for endogeneity of the location and timing of Wal-Mart openings that most likely biases the evidence against finding adverse effects of Wal-Mart stores. We address the endogeneity problem using a natural instrumental variables approach that arises from the geographic and time pattern of the opening of Wal-Mart stores, which slowly spread out from the first stores in Arkansas. The employment results indicate that a Wal-Mart store opening reduces county-level retail employment by about 150 workers, implying that each Wal-Mart worker replaces approximately 1.4 retail workers. This represents a 2.7 percent reduction in average retail employment. The payroll results indicate that Wal-Mart store openings lead to declines in county-level retail earnings of about $1.4 million, or 1.5 percent. Of course, these effects occurred against a backdrop of rising retail employment, and only imply lower retail employment growth than would have occurred absent the effects of Wal-Mart.

French Wine and the U.S. Boycott of 2003: Does Politics Really Affect Commerce?

In early 2003, France actively tried to thwart the plans of the Bush administration to build international support for a war to depose Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. In response, calls in the United States for a boycott of French products, wine in particular, rebounded through all forms of media. In the spring of 2003, French business people even reported that the boycott calls were hurting their U.S. sales. Using a dataset of sales of nearly 4,700 individual wine brands, we show that there actually was no boycott effect. Rather, sales of French wine dipped for two reasons. First, they experience a cyclical peak at holiday time, from November through early January, and the boycott was called during the February to May period. Second, sales of French wine have been in a secular decline in the United States. Sales in February through May 2003 merely stayed on trend. We contrast our results with other recent work that has found evidence of a boycott effect but that omits the holiday effect from several specifications. French wine producers may be having economic problems, but it is not because of their government's foreign policy.

Essays In Labor Economics And Industrial Organization

demand that takes into consideration product differentiation in the wine industry. Using nesting structures based on wine quality and origin, the correlation of individual tastes within constructed categories are estimated. Under a quality nesting structure, price and varietal offerings have a strong impact on the total brand market share relative to the share of an outside good. In addition, American wine drinkers who segment along quality tend to prefer European wines, and exhibit high correlation of tastes at both extremes of the quality spectrum. The origin-based nesting structure indicates similar effects from prices and varietals, but at a lower magnitude. Wine drinkers who segment based on origin have strongly heterogeneous preferences towards domestic wines. The final essay is a methodological implementation of an imputation model that will be used by the U.S. Census Bureau to assign quarterly hours and earnings to part-time federal workers in the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) programs's infrastructure files. An imputation procedure is necessary because the LEHD infrastructure source data provided by the Office of Personnel Management reports only the annualized salary for these workers and does not include information on the number of hours worked. The Bayesian statistical method implemented in the paper specifes a prior distribution and likelihood function for several demographic characteristics of federal workers. These characteristics, along with hours worked, can be identified in Current Population Survey data. A Dirichlet posterior predictive distribution is derived and used to generate cell probabilities for each combination of characteristics. Finally, draws are made from the posterior distribution to assign quarterly hours and earnings to part-time workers. A test implementation of the imputation strategy is performed, producing internally consistent results. The results are also compared to external public use data. c 2013 Stephen Michael Ciccarella ALL RIGHTS RESERVE

The effects of Wal-Mart on local labor markets

We estimate the effects of Wal-Mart stores on county-level retail employment and earnings, accounting for endogeneity of the location and timing of Wal-Mart openings that most likely biases the evidence against finding adverse effects of Wal-Mart stores. We address the endogeneity problem using a natural instrumental variables approach that arises from the geographic and time pattern of the opening of Wal-Mart stores, which slowly spread out from the first stores in Arkansas. The employment results indicate that a Wal-Mart store opening reduces county-level retail employment by about 150 workers, implying that each Wal-Mart worker replaces approximately 1.4 retail workers. This represents a 2.7 percent reduction in average retail employment. The payroll results indicate that Wal-Mart store openings lead to declines in county-level retail earnings of about $1.4 million, or 1.5 percent. Of course, these effects occurred against a backdrop of rising retail employment, and only imply lower retail employment growth than would have occurred absent the effects of Wal-Mart.Wal-Mart Employment Earnings