Essays on Retail and Regional Economics

This dissertation is composed of three essays at the intersection of regional economic analysis and industrial organization. In the first chapter, I derive an estimating equation for retail market structure in order to quantify the effects of e-commerce competition on brick and mortar retail establishment and employment counts. Using a multilevel regression specification, I find that (i) e-commerce establishment count exposure results show heterogeneity in the sign of the effects across the retail sectors represented in the data (ii) the magnitude of the e-commerce exposure effect is also heterogeneous across retail sectors (iii) the heterogeneity is not purely random and correlates highly with retail industrial characteristics like the labor share of receipts and profit margins, (iv) the e-commerce exposure is passed through to intensive margins like employment. The second essay turns to a regional focus, where I develop a multilevel difference-in-difference approach to estimate the causal effects of discontinued Shuttle launches on the industry and labor markets of Florida\u27s Space Coast. I find strong evidence for (i) an across industry substitution effect previously unexplored in the regional literature(ii) a spike in unemployment of 17% relative to the estimated counterfactual outcome for the region (iii) a contraction in payroll of nearly 10% of regional GDP in some industries combined with a gain of 7.5% through across industry labor reallocation. In the final essay, I focus on the relationship between the size of retail establishments and the growth of their proximate markets. In accomplishing this, I demonstrate the utility of Department of Defense satellite images of ambient night light activity as a measure of the spatial variation in economic activity, as well as a measure of economic growth. This allowed me to use a dynamic panel regression approach to test the concentrating effect of market growth on retail firms. I find evidence that (i) with an autoregressive coefficient closer to 0 than 1 (alpha=0.23), establishment size is not persistent (ii) firms adjustment contemporaneously to economic growth and discount past growth for hiring decisions (iii) a positive and significant firm size elasticity with respect to spatial variation in economic activity

A database and synthesis of northern peatland soil properties and Holocene carbon and nitrogen accumulation

Here, we present results from the most comprehensive compilation of Holocene peat soil properties with associated carbon and nitrogen accumulation rates for northern peatlands. Our database consists of 268 peat cores from 215 sites located north of 45 degrees N. It encompasses regions within which peat carbon data have only recently become available, such as the West Siberia Lowlands, the Hudson Bay Lowlands, Kamchatka in Far East Russia, and the Tibetan Plateau. For all northern peatlands, carbon content in organic matter was estimated at 42 +/- 3% (standard deviation) for Sphagnum peat, 51 +/- 2% for non-Sphagnum peat, and at 49 +/- 2% overall. Dry bulk density averaged 0.12 +/- 0.07 g/cm(3), organic matter bulk density averaged 0.11 +/- 0.05 g/cm(3), and total carbon content in peat averaged 47 +/- 6%. In general, large differences were found between Sphagnum and non-Sphagnum peat types in terms of peat properties. Time-weighted peat carbon accumulation rates averaged 23 +/- 2 (standard error of mean) g C/m(2)/yr during the Holocene on the basis of 151 peat cores from 127 sites, with the highest rates of carbon accumulation (25-28 g C/m(2)/yr) recorded during the early Holocene when the climate was warmer than the present. Furthermore, we estimate the northern peatland carbon and nitrogen pools at 436 and 10 gigatons, respectively. The database is publicly available at https://peatlands.lehigh.edu