Basker 2007 The Causes and Consequences of Wal Mart S Growth

Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 21, Number 3—Summer 2007—Pages 177–198
The Causes and Consequences

of Wal-Mart’s Growth
Emek Basker
W al-Mart plays a large and ever-growing role in the U.S. economy. As of

January 31, 2007, Wal-Mart operated more than 3,400 U.S. Wal-Mart
stores along with more than 550 Sam’s Club locations. Wal-Mart is the
largest private employer in the United States, with 1.3 million employees, and the
largest retailer in the United States. In 2004, Wal-Mart handled 6.5 percent of U.S.
retail sales (8.8 percent if automobile sales are excluded); this number has since
increased. Wal-Mart is the top U.S. seller of apparel, groceries, and music, among
other products, and is the top retailer in most states. Wal-Mart’s 2005 revenues
exceeded those of the next five U.S. retailers combined; these are Home Depot,
Kroger, Sears Holding Company (which includes Sears and Kmart), Costco, and
Target (Schultz, 2006). Wal-Mart currently accounts for 28 percent of Playtex’s
sales, 25 percent of Clorox’s, 21 percent of Revlon’s, 13 percent of Kimberly-
Clark’s, and 17 percent of Kellogg’s (Weinswig and Tang, 2006). Wal-Mart also
accounts for over 15 percent of U.S. imports of consumer goods from China. More
than 120 million U.S. consumers shop at Wal-Mart every week, and 84 percent of
Americans shopped at Wal-Mart at least once during 2005 (Pew Research Center,
2005).1
Wal-Mart is also the largest retailer in the world. From a global perspective,
Wal-Mart’s sales are larger than the next three retailers combined: Carrefour
(France), Home Depot (United States), and Metro (Germany). Although Wal-Mart
recently sold its South Korean and German operations, it currently operates or
owns a majority stake in a local firm in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Costa
1
Some references to Pew Research Center (2005) in the text refer to a special tabulation from the survey
generously provided by Peyton Craighill.
y Emek Basker is Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Missouri, Columbia,

Missouri.
178 Journal of Economic Perspectives
Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico,

and the United Kingdom. It is the largest or second-largest retailer in several of
these countries. Wal-Mart recently announced plans to open stores as part of a joint
venture in India and is reportedly looking for a partner in Russia (Giridharadas and
Rai, 2006; Reuters, 2007).
Wal-Mart’s size alone warrants studying its effects. By the end of 2005,
46 percent of Americans lived within five miles of the nearest Wal-Mart or Sam’s
Club store, and 88 percent lived within 15 miles of the nearest store; and Wal-Mart
accounted for nearly 9 percent of all retail workers in the United States. Because
the chain has a presence in so many markets, virtually all other retailers compete
head-to-head with Wal-Mart: 67 percent of all retail stores in the United States are
located within five miles of a Wal-Mart. In addition, Wal-Mart has been a leader in
the retail sector on many fronts: its investments in information technology; its
transformation of supply-chain relationships by establishing private-label brands
and purchasing more products directly from overseas producers; and its embrace
of a low-service, “one-stop shopping” format have all been emulated by other
retailers. As the retail sector continues to evolve, Wal-Mart provides a useful prism
through which to evaluate these changes, and its current innovations may well be
harbingers of the future.
Wal-Mart’s growth has coincided with and amplified several existing trends in
the U.S. retail sector. In this context, Wal-Mart’s rise is as much a cause as it is an
effect of larger changes in technology, trade patterns, and consumer tastes. Be-
tween 1963— one year after the first Wal-Mart store opened in Rogers, Arkansas—
and 2002, the number of single-store retailers in the United States declined by
55 percent while the number of chain stores nearly doubled. The number of stores
belonging to chains with 100 or more stores more than tripled over this period
(U.S. Census Bureau, 1963, 2002). Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, and Costco combined
still account for a very small fraction of all retail stores, but they represent an
increasing and disproportionate share of all dollar sales.
The competitive pressures created by large retailers have long been contro-
versial. As far back as the 1920s, retail chains have been accused of “paying low
wages, not contributing to their communities, taking money out of communities,
paying fewer taxes than local merchants, and turning America into ‘a nation of
clerks’” (Ross, 1984). Though the identity of large retailers has changed over time,
very similar accusations are being leveled at Wal-Mart today. Even as consumers
flock to shop at Wal-Mart, many express concerns about its economic impact. In a
Pew Research Center (2005) survey, 19 percent of respondents with a Wal-Mart
store in their area thought that it had had a negative effect locally, and 24 percent
of all respondents thought that Wal-Mart was bad for the country. Perhaps not
surprisingly, non-Wal-Mart shoppers were nearly four times more likely than those
who shop at Wal-Mart regularly to think Wal-Mart had had a negative effect on their
area, and more than four times as likely to think that Wal-Mart has had a bad effect
on the country (Pew Research Center, 2005).
This paper begins by exploring the source of Wal-Mart’s competitive advan-
tage. It then examines some of the economic effects of Wal-Mart: how Wal-Mart
Emek Basker 179
stores affect local labor markets, consumer prices, product selection, local and
global competitors, and suppliers. Sorting out cause and effect in these studies can
be tricky because the location of Wal-Mart stores is an endogenous choice. If the
places in which Wal-Mart opens stores are systematically different from the places
it avoids—for example, if it prefers thriving areas, shying away from declining
ones— or if Wal-Mart opens stores during temporary periods of growth, a naive
“before-and-after” look would conclude that Wal-Mart has had a more positive
effect than it actually does. I then turn to Wal-Mart’s interaction with public policy
issues in matters of global trade as well as state and local legislation on wages,
benefits, zoning, and subsidies.
This paper aims to dispel some of the myths regarding Wal-Mart and to replace
them with a systematic accounting of what is known about Wal-Mart’s impact on the
U.S. and global economy. Media reports often portray Wal-Mart as a “job destroyer”
and a force that levels Main Streets, but there is little evidence to support this view.
Wal-Mart’s impact on jobs is modest, and probably positive; and the effect on other
businesses is also relatively small. In the process, I highlight potential areas for
future research and discuss available data sources as well as some methodological
pitfalls.
Wal-Mart’s Advantage
While Wal-Mart’s advantage over other retailers has been undisputed for some
time, the sources and magnitude of this advantage are not fully understood. Part of
the reason for this is the retail production function—the relevant inputs and
outputs, and the relationship between them— has only recently begun to receive
serious academic attention (for an overview of this topic, see Betancourt, 2005).
Nevertheless, a number of studies by industry analysts and academic economists
provide a glimpse into the sources of Wal-Mart’s advantage.
By all accounts, technology and scale are at the core of Wal-Mart’s advantage
over its rivals. Across the retail sector, stores that belong to retail chains tend to be
more efficient than single-store retailers, and chains tend to invest more in infor-
mation technology (Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan, 2006; Doms, Jarmin, and
Klimek, 2004). Wal-Mart’s technological edge is in its logistics, distribution, and
inventory control; having installed a computer in its first distribution center in
1969, it had, by the late 1970s, connected all Wal-Mart stores and distribution
centers along with company headquarters to a computer network. Wal-Mart was an
early adopter of bar-code technology. It installed bar-code readers in all distribu-
tion centers by the late 1980s, reducing by half the labor cost of processing
shipments (Vance and Scott, 1994). In 1990, Wal-Mart introduced Retail Link—
software connecting its stores, distribution centers, and suppliers and providing
detailed inventory data “to bring our suppliers closer to our individual stores”
(Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 1991, p. 3). Wal-Mart is currently at the forefront of efforts
to use Radio Frequency Identification—a technology in which each individual item
receives a tag that can be read by a radio signal, thus facilitating tracking shipments,
inventory, and sales. Wal-Mart also operates the largest private satellite communi-
cations network in the world.
Empirically, it is difficult to distinguish between two explanations for Wal-
Mart’s size and high efficiency level. On the one hand, Wal-Mart may have lower
costs than other retailers, and this cost advantage could be responsible for its
growth. Alternatively, Wal-Mart’s expansion could have allowed it to take advantage
of economies of scale, reducing its costs relative to competitors. In Basker and Van
(2007), my coauthor and I argue that these two explanations are closely related:
Wal-Mart’s better technology has allowed it to grow, and this growth has lowered its
operating costs through economies of scale. Viewed this way, economies of scale at
both the store and chain levels amplify Wal-Mart’s advantage, rather than being its
root cause.
At the chain level, Wal-Mart’s scale has increased its market power in input
markets. Size also gives Wal-Mart an advantage in any activity that involves a fixed
cost, such as contracting with foreign suppliers, so Wal-Mart can import at lower
average cost than other retailers, spurring further growth. In Basker and Van
(2007), we also argue that scale reduces the marginal cost of a sale: using data for
Wal-Mart, we estimate that elasticity of the marginal cost associated with an addi-
tional sale with respect to sales volume is approximately – 0.2; in other words, a 10
percent increase in total sales volume decreases marginal cost by 2 percent.
At the store level, the availability of bar code technology and now Radio
Frequency Identification that reduces inventory tracking costs increases the incen-
tives of stores to add product lines (Holmes, 2001). After adding pharmacies and
auto services to its stores in the 1980s, Wal-Mart entered the supermarket industry
in 1988 with a single Supercenter in Washington, Missouri. (Supercenters sell a full
line of groceries in addition to general merchandise, such as clothes, housewares,
toys, and cosmetics.) Wal-Mart currently operates more than 2,200 U.S. Supercen-
ters and is the largest supermarket chain by sales in the United States. The
interaction of economies of scale and scope increases Wal-Mart’s optimal chain size
as its stores grow, and the stores’ optimal size as the chain grows (Basker, Klimek,
and Van, 2007).
Wal-Mart locates its stores in places where it expects to be profitable, taking
into consideration, as much as possible, information about demand and cost factors
as well as the competitive environment and how this is expected to evolve after
Wal-Mart’s entry. Holmes (2006) and Jia (2005) discuss various demographic
factors that predict Wal-Mart’s entry, such as the size and density of the population
and its age and income distributions. These and other variables that are harder to
observe and measure tend to be spatially correlated: urban counties are located
near other urban counties, counties with a given industrial composition tend to be
located near other counties with a similar composition, and so on. Such correla-
tions partly explain why Wal-Mart stores tend to locate near one another, an
observation first made by Graff and Ashton (1994). Figure 1 shows Wal-Mart’s store
locations in eight-year intervals from 1965 to 2005. The pattern of expansion
repeats itself, in an accelerated mode, for Supercenters; Figure 2 shows Super-
center locations in five-year intervals from 1990 to 2005.
The Causes and Consequences of Wal-Mart’s Growth 181
Figure 1
Wal-Mart Store Locations, 1965–2005
(a) 1965 (b) 1973
(c) 1981 (d) 1989
(e) 1997 (f) 2005
The downside of opening stores close to each other is the potential for
cannibalizing the sales of other stores in the chain. However, opening stores close
to each other has also allowed Wal-Mart to exploit economies of density in distri-
bution, training, and advertising (Holmes, 2006). This positive effect appears to
have overwhelmed any negative effect on profit due to self-cannibalization. Wal-
Mart’s expansion strategy also helps to explain the firm’s success relative to Kmart
and Target, which had different expansion strategies (Graff, 1998; Holmes, 2006).
Holmes (2006) estimates a structural demand model that takes into account both
population and store characteristics, and a cost function that depends on store-level
employment and the store’s distance to the nearest distribution center. He then
compares store-by-store operating profits (actual dollar sales less estimated costs
based on known store-level employment and other factors) with those that would
have obtained had the store faced the same demand conditions but different costs.
His estimates suggest that, all else equal, locating a store immediately next to a
distribution center increases its annual operating profit by $220,000 (in 2005
dollars) relative to locating it 100 miles away.
The combination of technological prowess and economies of scale, scope,
and density have made Wal-Mart a major contributor to the overall increase in
productivity in the retail sector. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, Table 1
Figure 2
Wal-Mart Supercenter Locations, 1990 –2005
(a) 1990 (b) 1995
(c) 2000 (d) 2005
compares growth in real dollar sales per worker in the general-merchandise

sector, using Census of Retail Trade publications, with growth in real dollar
sales per worker in Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores. By this metric, Wal-Mart’s produc-
tivity increased by 54.5 percent over the period 1982–2002, while productivity in
the general merchandise sector as a whole (including Wal-Mart) increased by
only 35.3 percent.2 If Wal-Mart’s employment and sales are subtracted from the
sector’s aggregate numbers, productivity growth in this sector over this 20-year
period is reduced to just 18.5 percent. One way to interpret these numbers is
that Wal-Mart is responsible for almost half of the productivity growth, mea-
sured as growth in sales per worker, in the general merchandise sector. In a
similar vein, McKinsey Global Institute (2001) calculates that in the late 1980s
and 1990s, Wal-Mart’s real value-added per worker was more than 40 percent
higher than that of other general merchandise retailers. Consistent with these
calculations, U.S. Census Bureau data show that almost all labor productivity
growth in the U.S. retail sector in the 1990s came from the expansion of
more-productive retail chains and the contraction and exit of less-productive
retailers (Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan, 2006). Disclosure limitations prevent
identifying individual firms in Census data, but Wal-Mart was the single-fastest
growing retail chain during this period.
Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (2006) do not estimate within-firm productiv-
ity growth, but Wal-Mart’s investment in information technology does appear to
have increased its own productivity over the last several decades. Computations
from Basker and Van (2007) indicate that improvements in Wal-Mart’s technology
2
The composition of the “general merchandise” sector was largely unaffected by the switch from the
Standard Industrial Classification, which was used to classify industries in the 1982 Census, to the North
American Industrial Classification System, used in the 2002 Census.
Emek Basker 183
Table 1
Labor Productivity Growth in the General Merchandise Sector and at Wal-Mart
General merchandise General merchandise sector

sector Wal-Mart excluding Wal-Mart
Sales, 1982 (millions of $) 252,217 6,833 245,384

Sales, 2002 (millions of $) 483,338 204,987 278,351
Employment, 1982 1,875,965 46,000 1,829,965
Employment, 2002 2,524,729 800,000 1,724,729
Sales per worker, 1982 ($) 134,447 148,543 134,092
Sales per worker, 2002 ($) 191,441 256,234 161,388
Growth in sales per workera 0.353 0.545 0.185
Source: Author’s calculations from U.S. Census Bureau (1982, 2002) and Wal-Mart Annual Reports
(Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 1983, 2003).
Notes: Wal-Mart’s figures refer to U.S. Operations. Sales are in millions of 2005 dollars; sales per worker
are in 2005 dollars.
a
Growth rate calculated as a log difference.
have reduced its cost of operating a large chain. Had these technological innova-
tions taken place holding fixed Wal-Mart’s chain size, its logistics and distribution
costs would have fallen by an average of 5.4 percent per year between 1980 and
2005. Instead, Wal-Mart’s chain grew by approximately 12 percent annually, taking
advantage of this increased efficiency.
Labor Markets
A new Wal-Mart store hires several hundred workers when it opens. Depending
on local market conditions, the number of applicants is frequently five, ten, or even
25 times larger than the number of positions advertised. In October 2005, for
example, 11,000 applicants applied for 400 positions at a new Wal-Mart store in
Oakland, California; this number of applicants is not unusual in high-unemployment
urban areas. According to press releases Wal-Mart issues when new or renovated
stores open for business, the median new or newly-renovated Wal-Mart store has
about 400 employees, or “associates” as the company calls them (300 for Discount
Stores, 425 for Supercenters). But these increases in jobs are mostly offset by job
losses at competing retailers that contract or exit as a consequence of Wal-Mart’s
entry.
The net effect on jobs is positive, even five years after Wal-Mart’s entry, but it
is quite small. To study this issue, I collected approximate opening dates for all
Wal-Mart stores from various public sources, including Wal-Mart Annual Reports,
annual directories of discount department stores published by Chain Store Guides,
and special Wal-Mart editions of Rand McNally Road Atlases (Basker, 2005a).3 I
3
The data are available at 具http://economics.missouri.edu/⬃baskere/data/典. The appendices in Neu-
mark, Zhang, and Ciccarella (2005) and Basker (2006) provide some detail—and contrasting perspec-
combined these data with County Business Patterns data from the U.S. Census
Bureau, which include the number of jobs in each county by sector and year for the
period 1977–1999, to estimate Wal-Mart’s effect on the number of retail and
wholesale jobs. After controlling for time-invariant county characteristics using
county fixed effects and for different exogenous time patterns of employment for
urban, rural, and suburban counties, I find that the number of retail jobs in a
county increases by 100 the year Wal-Mart opens a new store (relative to what would
have happened had Wal-Mart stayed out of the county), and by 50 after five years.4
However, the number of wholesale jobs declines by about 30 in the long run,
reflecting the fact that Wal-Mart is vertically integrated: unlike the merchants it
replaces, Wal-Mart does not rely on local wholesalers.
Because Wal-Mart stores are not randomly placed, estimating Wal-Mart’s im-
pact on labor markets without accounting for the potential endogeneity of Wal-
Mart’s entry decision, both regarding the locations of Wal-Mart stores and the timing
of entry, is subject to omitted-variable and selection biases. There is no ironclad
solution to this problem, but several approaches have been used.
In Basker (2005a), I address selection bias by dropping from the sample very
small and historically declining counties—the sorts of places that Wal-Mart very
rarely enters. I address the endogeneity of the timing of Wal-Mart’s entry with an
instrumental-variables specification that exploits information on stores’ planned
opening dates. Using planned opening dates as an instrument for actual openings
cannot address endogeneity in the locations Wal-Mart chooses to enter, because
locations with no Wal-Mart store do not have a planned opening date. It is a valid
instrument for the endogenous timing of entry if Wal-Mart is unable to forecast
economic conditions one or two years ahead. As a specification check, I estimate
Wal-Mart’s effect on manufacturing employment and find an economically small
and statistically insignificant impact. Most of Wal-Mart’s purchasing is done
through centralized facilities, so adding a single store in a county is unlikely to
affect local manufacturing employment.
A recent paper by Neumark, Zhang, and Ciccarella (2005) uses an alternative
methodology and concludes that Wal-Mart is a net job destroyer. Like Basker
(2005a), Neumark, Zhang, and Ciccarella use local economic data from the County
tives— on the quality of the data. Other data on Wal-Mart store openings are also available. Following
a recent public relations campaign, Wal-Mart selectively released data on store openings it had previ-
ously been reluctant to share; Neumark, Zhang, and Ciccarella (2005) were the first to use these data;
I used them subsequently in Basker (2006). In late 2005, Wal-Mart posted a spreadsheet with the original
opening dates of its existing stores on its public relations site, 具http://www.walmartfacts.com典, but later
modified the spreadsheet by removing the opening dates and years. Dube, Eidlin, and Lester (2007) use
these data. An anti-Wal-Mart umbrella group called Wal-Mart Watch, which can be contacted at
具http://www.walmartwatch.com典, has also compiled a list of all Wal-Mart’s store locations and opening
dates, along with store characteristics, including employment and square footage, which it makes
available to researchers who sign a confidentiality agreement. Store-level characteristics are also available
from TradeDimensions, a unit of ACNeilsen, and have been used by Holmes (2006).
4
Consistent with these results, regulations restricting entry of large retailers into French and Italian
retail markets have had negative effects on employment growth (Bertrand and Kramarz, 2002; Viviano,
2006).
Business Patterns, which they combine with administrative data from Wal-Mart on
store locations and opening dates. To address endogeneity, Neumark, Zhang, and
Ciccarella use an instrumental variables specification that exploits the geographic
pattern of Wal-Mart’s expansion, as depicted in Figure 1.5 They argue that until
1995, the distance from each county to Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville,
Arkansas, largely determined when a Wal-Mart store first opened in the county.
However, this instrument can be questioned because counties that are close to
Bentonville, Arkansas, share many other characteristics, including low population
density and similar demographic and industrial compositions. Conversely, counties
that are far from Bentonville tend to have other common features: for example,
almost all major population centers in the United States are concentrated in a band
between 900 and 1,300 miles from Bentonville. Thus, the distance from Bentonville
can have a direct effect on economic fluctuations, independent of Wal-Mart’s entry
pattern.6
In another analysis, Drewianka and Johnson (2006) estimate Wal-Mart’s job
effects in an ordinary least squares specification that includes a full set of county-
specific trends and find small but positive employment effects. They argue that
their use of county-specific trends allows them to sidestep the identification prob-
lem by controlling for trends that predate Wal-Mart and are likely to have influ-
enced its entry decision. This specification is valid, providing unbiased estimates of
Wal-Mart’s causal impact, if Wal-Mart selects locations based only on a country’s
growth rate and is not influenced by other factors that are also correlated with
future economic performance.
On balance, it seems clear that Wal-Mart has a small net impact on retail and
wholesale jobs. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that effects on aggregate county-
level employment—across all sectors in the local economy— cannot be precisely
estimated (Basker, 2005a). On average, about 12 percent of a county’s workers are
employed in the retail sector, and another 6 percent are employed in the wholesale
sector. While it is possible with some statistical confidence to detect fluctuations of
20 –100 jobs in a sector that employs only a few hundred or even a couple of
thousand workers, it is nearly impossible to do this at the aggregate level when
50 jobs constitute less than 1 percent of total employment.
These results remain open to various questions. For example, county-level data
on retail employment do not distinguish between part-time and full-time jobs, so if
Wal-Mart employs more part-time workers than the retailers it replaces, the total
number of jobs may rise while the number of full-time equivalent jobs actually falls.
Unfortunately, there is no definitive evidence on average hours of work by Wal-
Mart employees compared with other retail employees, and at present, the impor-
tance of this effect is unknown.
In addition, any gains in retail employment in the county in which Wal-Mart
5
Dube, Eidlin, and Lester (2007), discussed below, independently proposed this same instrumental
variables method, but they focus on Wal-Mart’s effect on wages and other compensation.
6
For a technical discussion and critique of the Neumark, Zhang, and Ciccarella (2005) methodology,
see Basker (2006).
opens may come at the expense of jobs across county lines. To date, attempts to
quantify cross-county effects have not been successful (Basker, 2005a). One possi-
ble indirect test is that the own-county employment effect of Wal-Mart should be
larger (more positive) when Wal-Mart opens close to a county line—so that some
of its competitors are in another county—than when it is located far from any
neighboring counties. Another way to evaluate the importance of this explanation
would be to estimate the rate at which Wal-Mart’s impact diminishes with distance
using finer geographic data—for example from Zip Code Business Patterns.
Neither of these approaches has been pursued to date.
Very little is known about Wal-Mart’s effect on the composition of the work
force—its age, education, and experience—and the wages and benefits it receives.
The starting wage and pattern of raises varies across Wal-Mart stores, depending on
local market conditions. Two studies find negative effects of Wal-Mart on the pay of
retail employees, but due to a lack of available data, these studies are limited in
their ability to control for worker and job characteristics (such as hours, shifts, and
job responsibilities). Neumark, Zhang, and Ciccarella (2005), discussed above, use
local economic data from the County Business Patterns, while Dube, Eidlin, and
Lester (2007) use data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Both
use an interaction of time and distance from Bentonville to address endogeneity in
the firm’s location decisions and are subject to the criticism discussed above. A
further difficulty in interpreting these results comes from the absence of controls
for job and worker quality, although Dube, Eidlin, and Lester (2007) make an
effort to address this issue using supplemental data from the March Current
Population Survey. The Current Population Survey includes information on hourly
wages, education, and demographic variables and specifies the occupation and
industry of the worker’s primary job. Because of data limitations, Dube, Eidlin, and
Lester (2007) use state-level averages to estimate the effect of Wal-Mart on hourly
wages; they control for average demographics (average age, percent white, percent
of workers with a high school education or lower level of educational attainment)
and find that entry of ten Wal-Mart stores causes the average hourly wage of retail
workers in the state to fall by 2 percent.
Talk of Wal-Mart’s effect on wages often turns to the company’s famously
antiunion labor practices. The retail sector is, as a rule, less unionized than other
sectors. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2004, 5.7 percent of retail
workers were union members as compared to 7.9 percent of workers in the private
sector overall, and weekly earnings of unionized retail workers were approximately
11 percent higher than weekly earnings of their nonunionized peers (Bureau of
Labor Statistics, 2005). If the retail sector is relatively nonunionized, Wal-Mart is an
extreme example: there are no unionized Wal-Mart stores in North America. After
meat packers in a Texas Wal-Mart Supercenter voted to unionize in 2000, Wal-Mart
switched to prepackaged beef and closed down its meat-packing departments in
several states. In 2005, Wal-Mart closed a store in Quebec whose workers had voted
to unionize.
Wal-Mart’s antiunion stance has changed practices throughout the retail sec-
tor. In October 2003, approximately 60,000 unionized grocery workers in Califor-
Emek Basker 187
nia went on a four-month strike when their employers wanted to lower starting
wages in anticipation of competition from Wal-Mart Supercenters. Grocery stores
eventually won this concession, giving some legitimacy to the view that Wal-Mart’s
rise has had a negative effect on retail wages. At least where the retail sector is
unionized, it seems reasonable that Wal-Mart’s entry or threat of entry could
similarly reduce wages even if it increases employment.
Wal-Mart’s benefits packages have come under scrutiny and have been im-
proved in recent years. According to the company, 47 percent of employees are
covered by its health plans, some of which feature very low monthly premiums (as
low as $11 a month), but 10 percent of Wal-Mart’s employees have no health
insurance at all (Barbaro and Abelson, 2007). Comparable figures for other retail-
ers are hard to find, and despite wide speculation about Wal-Mart’s role in increas-
ing low-income workers’ dependence on Medicaid, there is no systematic research
about this issue.
Lawsuits by current and former employees have accused Wal-Mart of various
illegal and unethical practices, including requiring employees to work off the clock
or miss mandated meal breaks. Indeed, workers have filed lawsuits accusing Wal-
Mart of requiring off-the-clock work in at least 30 states. Some cases have settled,
including one in Colorado, but others have gone to trial. In October 2006, a jury
in Pennsylvania awarded current and former workers $78 million in unpaid wages.
In addition, a federal class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart for discrimination
against female employees is currently pending; the potential plaintiff pool consists
of a record-breaking 1.5 to 2.0 million current and former female employees. Other
accusations against Wal-Mart include locking overnight employees in stores (Green-
house, 2004) and hiring illegal immigrants. Of course, any large employer inevita-
bly attracts some accusations and lawsuits, and no research to date has examined
whether Wal-Mart has committed more actual violations than its competitors on an
employee-weighted basis.
Consumers
Consumers favor Wal-Mart for its lower prices. Answering an open-ended

question soliciting the “best thing about Wal-Mart,” 50 percent of respondents of a
Pew Research Center (2005) poll named low prices, 22 percent named broad
selection/variety, and 13 percent gave answers related to location, hours, and other
convenience factors. Poorer consumers are much more likely to shop at Wal-Mart
than are richer ones and have benefited disproportionately from Wal-Mart’s rise. In
the Pew survey, 53 percent of respondents reporting annual earnings below $20,000
said they shopped at Wal-Mart “regularly,” compared with 33 percent of respon-
dents earning more than $50,000. The average annual household income among
Wal-Mart shoppers is $40,000 –$45,000, roughly equal to the U.S. median house-
hold income, compared with $60,000 for Target shoppers and $74,000 for Costco
shoppers (Greenhouse, 2005; Mui, 2005).
The price differences between Wal-Mart and other retailers and the downward
pressure that Wal-Mart’s presence puts on other stores’ prices combine to miti-
gate—and possibly reverse—any negative effect Wal-Mart may have on workers’
wages. Estimates of the differences between Wal-Mart’s and competitors’ prices
range from 8 –27 percent, depending on the market and the selection of products.
In Basker and Noel (2006), my coauthor and I use store-level price data of specific
grocery items from the American Chamber of Commerce Research Association
(ACCRA) and find in a cross-sectional analysis that for cities with at least one
Wal-Mart Supercenter, Wal-Mart’s prices are on average 10 percent lower than
competitors’ prices. Moreover, this difference has increased over the period 2001–
2004 from approximately 5 percent to 15 percent. There is also considerable
variation by product, with Wal-Mart’s 2004 prices representing a discount of ap-
proximately 25–30 percent over traditional grocery stores for some items (chicken,
canned peas, and frozen corn) and only 4 percent for others (including soda and
milk). Hausman and Leibtag (2004; forthcoming (a)) use Homescan data from
ACNielsen to study price impacts of “nontraditional” food retail outlets like super-
stores, mass merchandisers, and clubs on “traditional” outlets like grocery stores
and supermarkets over the period 1998 –2001; they find that these nontraditional
outlets charged lower average prices for 19 of 20 products (the exception was soda),
with an average price difference of 27 percent.7
Wal-Mart’s entry tends to lower the prices that incumbent competitors charge
and in that way indirectly affects even consumers who shop elsewhere. (This effect
does show up in Consumer Price Index calculations.) Estimating the precise effect
on competitors requires addressing the same issues of endogeneity that arise when
considering Wal-Mart’s effect on labor markets. In Basker (2005b), I use the same
instrumental variables approach as in Basker (2005a), namely store planning dates,
to estimate Wal-Mart’s effect on citywide average prices of drugstore and clothing
products in 165 U.S. cities and find short-run declines of 1.5–3.0 percent in the
prices of aspirin, detergent, Kleenex, and toothpaste, with no statistically significant
effect on the prices of three clothing items. But because citywide price averages may
include Wal-Mart’s own prices (once a Wal-Mart opens in town), the estimated
effect may be an upper bound. In Basker and Noel (2006), my coauthor and I
attempt to overcome this problem by using store-level data for grocery items, from
which Wal-Mart’s own prices can be removed. We use a short time series of three
years and assume if a Wal-Mart Supercenter opened in a city over the period
7
The differences between the results in Hausman and Leibtag’s (forthcoming (a)) and Basker and Noel
(2006) are probably due to two factors. First, Hausman and Leibtag calculate average prices using
quantity weights, which is not possible to do with the ACCRA data. Second, ACCRA data exclude
membership clubs, which use two-part tariff pricing (an annual membership fee and lower prices) and
are therefore likely to pull down the average price for the nontraditional outlets relative to Wal-Mart’s
prices. Hausman and Leibtag (2004; forthcoming (b)) make the point that outlet substitution by
consumers—switching from traditional grocery stores to the nontraditional superstores, mass merchan-
disers, and clubs— has increased the bias in the Consumer Price Index because the Bureau of Labor
Statistics makes the strong assumption that all price differences between stores in a single market at a
given point in time are due to quality differences, even if the good is homogeneous.
2001–2004, the exact timing of the store opening is exogenous. With this assump-
tion, we estimate a short-run 1–2 percent price reduction by competing grocery
stores due to Wal-Mart’s entry.
The most ambitious work to date on the effect of new nontraditional grocery
formats like superstores, mass merchandisers, and clubs on consumers is by Haus-
man and Leibtag (forthcoming (a)). Hausman and Leibtag do not distinguish
between Wal-Mart stores and other nontraditional new sellers in their data, al-
though Wal-Mart is likely responsible for the bulk of nontraditional expenditures.
Using household-level grocery purchase data that include not only prices but also
quantity purchased and store, Hausman and Leibtag estimate the effect of the
expansion of the nontraditional format on prices at traditional grocery stores and
use these estimates to calculate welfare gains. To estimate the price effect on
competitors, Hausman and Leibtag regress the average quantity-weighted price
charged by traditional supermarkets for a given item—such as apple juice, eggs, or
ice cream— on city and time fixed effects and on the share of consumer expendi-
tures at superstores, mass merchandisers, and clubs for that item in each city and
month. Because consumers’ expenditure share at superstores, mass merchandisers,
and clubs is in part a function of the prices that traditional grocery stores charge,
Hausman and Leibtag instrument for this product-specific expenditure share using
the expenditure share at superstores, mass merchandisers, and clubs aggregated
across all products in the data, arguing that each good contributes a negligible
share to overall expenditure. The instrument is valid—picking up shifts due to all
other factors—as long as the price of good 1 (say, bananas) in one venue does not
have a direct effect on the price of good 2 (say, yogurt) in another venue and no
omitted variable affects both. They find that over a four-year period, expansion of
superstores, mass merchandisers, and clubs has caused traditional supermarkets to
lower prices by approximately 3 percent, with some variation across products.
One as-yet unstudied example of competitors’ responses to Wal-Mart’s price
reductions is Wal-Mart’s $4 prescription drug plan, announced in September 2006,
under which Wal-Mart offers prescriptions of over 300 generic drugs (up to a 30-day
supply) for $4 each. This offer prompted several other retailers including Target
and Kmart to start similar programs, while others such as CVS and Walgreens
declined to follow suit (Rowland and Krasner, 2006). Very little is known about the
effect of this competition on the prices consumers actually pay for prescription
drugs, on brand-name premiums, and on the drugstore and brand choices con-
sumers make.
In addition to a wide range of products and a growing menu of services,
Wal-Mart also sells convenience associated with one-stop shopping (Basker, Klimek,
and Van, 2007). Consistent with the idea that consumers value one-stop shopping,
Chiou (2005) finds that consumers have a preference for shopping at Wal-Mart,
even after controlling for Wal-Mart’s lower prices. She estimates a discrete choice
model using data on consumers’ DVD purchases by title, store, and price; consumer
demographic information; and consumers’ travel distance from the relevant stores
(including Kmart, Target, Best Buy, and Blockbuster Video). When consumer
preferences are allowed to depend on travel distance, price, individual demograph-
ics, and store identity, parameter estimates imply that the average consumer would
be willing to pay a premium to shop at Wal-Mart over the alternatives.
For some goods, however, lower prices and increased convenience are partially
mitigated by lower service levels, reduced product offerings, and other disameni-
ties. It is often observed that Wal-Mart carries fewer brands and varieties of common
goods—that it specializes in product breadth rather than depth—a strategy that
may have contributed to its lower inventory costs and stronger bargaining position
with suppliers. By revealed preference, many consumers are willing to accept this
tradeoff, but those whose tastes do not conform to Wal-Mart’s selection could be
made worse off if their favored retailers shut down or scale back operations. For
example, Wal-Mart does not carry music CDs whose lyrics or cover art it considers
offensive; consumers seeking such items have to go elsewhere, and often pay a
higher price.
Competitors
Inevitably, in a competitive environment, the emergence of a more-efficient

firm will tend to edge out some less-efficient incumbents and is likely to prompt
others to change some of their practices. This is, indeed, what we observe in the
case of Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart’s competitors divide into two broad categories: “local” competitors,
mostly incumbent retailers in markets Wal-Mart enters, and other large retail chains
with which Wal-Mart competes in many markets. Wal-Mart’s entry causes a small
number of local competitors in each market to shut down. Its effect on large chain
competitors is more complicated and needs further study to be properly quantified.
Local Competitors
Micro data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that normal “churn” is already
high in the retail sector—50 to 60 percent of retailers that exist one year disappear
within five years (Jarmin, Klimek, and Miranda, 2004). Wal-Mart creates an even
tougher competitive environment. Each new Wal-Mart store reduces local compet-
itors’ market share and profit margins, and causes some businesses to close. To
quantify this effect, Jia (2005) estimates a structural equilibrium model in which
first, two large discount chains (Wal-Mart and Kmart) make simultaneous moves;
and second, a competitive fringe of small retailers decides whether to open. She
uses the count of small general merchandise retailers from County Business Pat-
terns data for 1988 and 1997 and Wal-Mart and Kmart data from the Directory of
Discount Stores. The large chains’ entry behavior is assumed to depend on local
economic conditions and anticipation of the decisions of competitors (both large
and small) as well as on an incentive to locate stores in nearby markets to reduce
costs. Small stores’ entry decisions are assumed to be based on the observed entry
of each of the large chains. Jia (2005) finds that, on average, a county is served by
two or three fewer small general merchandise stores, such as dollar and variety
stores, if Wal-Mart or Kmart enter it than if either of these large retailers stays out.
Emek Basker 191
Since the average county had 3.86 small discount stores in 1988, this represents a
large percentage decline in the number of small discount stores. Jia (2005) argues
that Wal-Mart’s expansion alone explains 50 –70 percent of the net exit of small
discount retailers between 1988 and 1997. In Basker (2005a), I use the instrumen-
tal-variables approach discussed above to estimate the effect of Wal-Mart’s entry on
competitors, and I include not just general merchandisers, but all retailers—
grocery stores, apparel stores, and more—in the competitor universe. I find that, in
total, approximately four small competitors close within five years of Wal-Mart’s
entry. Since the average county has more than 200 small stores, these estimates
suggest Wal-Mart’s entry has only a minor effect on the number of small stores.
Although many incumbent competitors do not shut down, they may experi-
ence large reductions in revenues: In one study of a single market in upstate New
York, an incumbent supermarket lost 17 percent of its sales volume— but did not
shut down—in the year following a Wal-Mart Supercenter entry two miles away
(Singh, Hansen, and Blattberg, forthcoming).
Wal-Mart’s net effect on the number of retailers operating in a market masks
variation across both location and retail category. Within a county, some businesses
fare better than others, and there may be pockets of decline and other pockets of
growth both at the subsector level (say, grocery stores vs. home improvement
stores) and geographically. For example, in a case study of the Chicago market
using scanner data from Dominick’s Finer Foods, the entry of a Wal-Mart Discount
Store, which does not sell groceries, was estimated to increase revenue at an
adjacent traditional grocery store but to reduce revenue at a grocery store two miles
away (Zhu, Singh, and Dukes, 2005). This effect is similar to a mall anchor store that
increases traffic to smaller stores in the mall (Pashigian and Gould, 1998; Gould,
Pashigian, and Prendergast, 2005). Relatedly, Sobel and Dean (2006) cite anecdotal
evidence that the composition of retailers changes following Wal-Mart’s expansion into
an area, but this finding has not been confirmed in systematic studies.
Large Retail Chain Competitors

As large retail chains grow in importance (Jarmin, Klimek, and Miranda,
2005), so do the strategic interactions among them. Wal-Mart’s decisions not only
affect its large chain competitors, but are also shaped by their anticipated re-
sponses, creating an interaction that is more subtle and complex than the relation-
ship between Wal-Mart and its small-scale, local competitors. McKinsey Global
Institute (2001) cites evidence that other chain retailers have either explicitly
emulated Wal-Mart or, more broadly, changed their practices in ways that reflect
Wal-Mart’s influence: Target’s vice chairman is quoted as saying that Target is “the
world’s premier student of Wal-Mart” (p. 11).
The location patterns of the major chain retailers are jointly determined. For
example, Kmart and Target take Wal-Mart’s current and anticipated store locations
into account when they decide which markets to enter. Estimates from structural
models that account for this simultaneity indicate that Wal-Mart’s deterrent effect
on Kmart and Target is large relative to the counter effect these competitors exert
on Wal-Mart, and has increased over time (Jia, 2005; Zhu, Singh, and Manuszak,
2005). This deterrent effect, combined with economies of density, amplifies the
chains’ natural advantage in different regions—Wal-Mart, for example, is most
popular in the South and Midwest (Pew Research Center, 2005).
Internet retailers are also affected by Wal-Mart’s expansion. Using an ordinary
least squares difference-in-difference specification, Forman, Ghose, and Goldfarb
(2007) find that the types of books consumers purchase from Amazon.com changes
when a Wal-Mart or Target store opens in their town: more popular titles, which are
likely to be carried by these large discounters, become relatively less popular on
Amazon.com, and relatively more obscure titles take their place.
Suppliers
Wal-Mart’s buying power has affected both its business relationships with
suppliers and the way these suppliers organize internally. Several hundred of
Wal-Mart’s major suppliers have permanent offices near Wal-Mart’s headquarters in
Bentonville, Arkansas, to facilitate these relationships (Useem, 2003); information
sharing occurs in real time via Wal-Mart’s Retail Link software. Wal-Mart also serves
as a coordinating device for technology adoption where network externalities affect
the profitability of adoption. According to Javorcik, Keller, and Tybout (2006),
Wal-Mart’s entry into Mexico, for example, has resulted in large efficiency gains
among (Mexican) upstream suppliers of soaps, detergents, and surfactants. Most
recently, Wal-Mart is requiring its major suppliers to provide Radio Frequency
Identification tags (Boyle, 2003).
Wal-Mart’s growth, and with it buying power, may have been originally moti-
vated by a desire to obtain countervailing power against manufacturers and thereby
to lower costs (Chen, 2003). Some anecdotal evidence suggests that Wal-Mart has
used its bargaining power to push down wholesale prices, leading some to blame it
for business failures among U.S. producers of consumer goods (Fishman, 2006). If
suppliers are perfectly competitive and already earning zero economic profit, it is
hard to tell a story where Wal-Mart can force prices down. If suppliers are earning
some rents, however, Wal-Mart’s share of any surplus could well have increased as
the chain has grown.
Wal-Mart is also at the center of anxieties about importing manufactured
goods from low-cost producers: Wal-Mart’s suppliers are disproportionately foreign
and increasingly producing private-label goods. Wal-Mart was not always a major
importer. From 1985 to 1992, Wal-Mart’s “Buy American” campaign received much
media attention. Wal-Mart promised, among other things, to pay up to a 5 percent
premium for U.S.-made goods (Zellner, 1992). This campaign ended abruptly in
late 1992 after Dateline NBC aired a segment accusing Wal-Mart of producing
private-label goods in Bangladesh, smuggling textiles into the United States in
excess of quotas, and placing imported clothes on racks marked “Made in the USA”
(Gladstone, 1992). By 2004, Wal-Mart imported $18 billion worth of goods from
China alone, accounting for 15.4 percent of U.S. imports of consumer goods from
China that year (Basker and Van, 2007). Wal-Mart sources 100 percent of its
apparel from low-cost countries and sells a much higher share of private-label
apparel than other national apparel sellers (Gereffi, 2006). Wal-Mart’s scale facil-
itates its disproportionate use of direct global sourcing because direct sourcing
entails large fixed costs, which require large volumes to justify. At the same time,
global sourcing has contributed to Wal-Mart’s advantage over smaller retailers by
allowing it to procure inputs at lower cost; and as trade barriers have fallen, making
imports cheaper, Wal-Mart’s advantage has increased even further (Basker and
Van, 2007).
A public argument rages over whether a high level of imports of low-cost
manufactured goods from China is good for the U.S. economy. This paper isn’t the
place to tackle that issue. Whatever one’s standpoint in that dispute, however,
Wal-Mart’s position as a global purchaser puts it at the center of the action.
Wal-Mart and Government Policy
As a national chain with many retail outlets, Wal-Mart interacts with all levels
of government. At the federal level, Wal-Mart’s dependence on global suppliers is
behind its interest in a U.S. trade policy that allows for ease of importing. To that
end, Wal-Mart has participated in and helped to shape the Central American Free
Trade Agreement (CAFTA) (Cummings, 2004), and has lobbied for other open
trade deals. At the state and local levels, Wal-Mart has an interest in regulations that
affect wage and benefit policies, zoning, subsidies, and infrastructure development.
Until 1998 when Wal-Mart hired its first Washington lobbyist, it was fairly
detached from the national political process. But by 2005, its Political Action
Committee (PAC) was one of the largest in Washington (Cummings, 2004). In the
2004 election cycle, the Wal-Mart PAC donated over $2.7 million to political
campaigns, four times as much as it had contributed in 2000 and more than
10 times the amount it contributed to national campaigns in 1996. Wal-Mart’s PAC
was the twentieth-largest contributor in the 2004 election cycle and the ninth-
largest contributor to the Republican Party and Republican candidates. Over time,
the fraction of Wal-Mart’s contributions that have gone to Republican candidates
has declined from 98 to 80 percent (details available from the Center for Respon-
sive Politics at 具http://www.crp.org典). A major objective of Wal-Mart’s political
involvement at the federal level is to reduce U.S. trade barriers against countries
from which Wal-Mart would like to import more.
At the state level, the focus has been on wage and benefit laws that potentially
affect Wal-Mart’s cost advantage and its incentives to operate in different commu-
nities. Maryland’s “Fair Share Health Care Act,” which would have required Wal-
Mart to spend at least 8 percent of its total wage bill on health insurance, was to take
effect in 2007 but was overturned by a judge in July 2006. The bill would have
applied to all companies with at least 10,000 employees in the state, but Wal-Mart,
which had 15,681 employees in Maryland in March 2006, was the only company to
pass this threshold. Several other states (including New Jersey, Tennessee, and
Wisconsin) have considered similar legislation. In a similar vein, Chicago’s City
Council approved a minimum wage bill in July 2006 which, had it not been vetoed
by Mayor Daley, would have doubled the effective minimum wage paid by stores
with at least 90,000 square feet operated by retailers with at least $1 billion in
annual sales.
If any such a law ever takes effect, Wal-Mart could attempt to minimize the
impact by reducing store staffing levels, shutting down stores, or opening new
stores at a reduced rate. As a result, such a law would likely benefit competitors at
the expense of consumers. Given the estimates cited earlier of Wal-Mart’s effect on
labor markets, it seems likely that limiting Wal-Mart would slightly reduce the
number of retail jobs in many markets. If such legislation passes, a difference-in-
difference comparison of the behavior of Wal-Mart and other large retailers in the
affected city or state with the behavior of these retailers in comparable regions
(neighboring states or other large cities, for example) with regard to employment
levels, hours of operation, wages, benefits, and prices would be useful in informing
the public-policy debate.
Local governments have been split in their response to Wal-Mart: some have
attempted to limit Wal-Mart’s access with zoning regulations and “living wage”
ordinances, while others have welcomed Wal-Mart with infrastructure develop-
ments and other subsidies. An anti-Wal-Mart organization called Good Jobs First
found that 90 percent of Wal-Mart’s Distribution Centers and many of its stores
received government subsidies totaling over $1 billion (Mattera and Purinton,
2004). These subsidies have taken various forms, including infrastructure and site
preparation assistance, job training grants, property tax exemptions and abate-
ments, and sales tax abatements. Places that have limited Wal-Mart’s entry have
often cited its potential impact on urban sprawl, traffic, and congestion; however,
research is needed to test these claims. One reason some communities offer
Wal-Mart “welcome mats” is the common but statistically unconfirmed perception
that it is better to have a Wal-Mart open in one’s own jurisdiction than in a
neighboring community. As a result, Wal-Mart may be able to pit local municipal-
ities against one another to bid away a large share of the rents to the local
community. An alternative explanation for subsidization—that Wal-Mart would not
open in an area without it—is harder to support: Jia’s (2005) estimates indicate that
subsidized Wal-Mart stores are no less profitable than unsubsidized stores, gross of
the subsidies.
Concluding Remarks
Wal-Mart’s productivity advantage due to its large and early investment in

information technology has permanently changed the retail sector. Wal-Mart con-
tinues to formulate ambitious expansion plans, including the addition of geo-
graphic markets both in the United States and abroad and new products such as
Emek Basker 195
organic foods and financial services.8 As its large chain competitors strive to
emulate Wal-Mart’s technological innovations and suppliers worldwide become
increasingly connected to their downstream buyers, the retail sector as a whole has
become more efficient at providing consumers with the goods they want at better
prices and with increased convenience.
Wal-Mart’s biggest and most obvious effect is that it provides lower prices to
consumers. The competitive pressure of Wal-Mart has lowered prices that consum-
ers pay even when they do not shop at Wal-Mart; but this pressure also reduces the
profitability of other stores and in some cases causes stores, especially small ones, to
shut down. Wal-Mart’s investment in technology and its tight control over the
supply chain have also changed the competitive environment upstream. As Wal-
Mart’s size has made direct sourcing more profitable, and as the fixed costs of doing
business with Wal-Mart have increased (due to factors ranging from the need for a
local office in Bentonville, to Wal-Mart’s requirement that suppliers install Radio
Frequency Identification tags on shipments), small producers have made room for
larger ones, and local producers have been displaced by foreign ones. Wal-Mart has
therefore contributed to the trend of increased outsourcing and imports.
While much is known about Wal-Mart, many of its economic effects remain
unquantified. Wal-Mart’s effect on jobs is modest and likely to be positive, but its
effect on wages— controlling for workers’ characteristics—requires further investi-
gation. Only anecdotal evidence exists about Wal-Mart’s effects on product selec-
tion; and its impact on upstream industrial structure and the location of production
are only beginning to be explored. Wal-Mart’s effects on local government expen-
ditures, urban sprawl, traffic, crime, and social capital have received some attention
in popular discourse. Hicks (2005a,b) takes a first look at Wal-Mart’s impact on
government expenditures, but there are no systematic studies establishing Wal-
Mart’s effect on these outcomes. Retail markets differ in important ways across
countries, and Wal-Mart’s impact is likely to vary with industrial structure, regula-
tion, and consumer tastes, but no studies have yet quantified the local impact of
Wal-Mart’s international stores. In this context, Wal-Mart’s anticipated entry into
Indian and Russian markets and its recent exit from the South Korean and German
markets could serve as useful case studies.
Another important open question is the extent to which Wal-Mart’s impact on
local economies is qualitatively or quantitatively different from the effects of other
“big box” retailers such as Kmart, Target, or Costco. These smaller chains have not
attracted the same level of public interest and, therefore, research as Wal-Mart. One
notable exception is Jia (2005), who estimates the effect of both Wal-Mart and
Kmart on small general merchandise stores and finds that they have similar impacts
on exit decisions.
Finally, what is known about Wal-Mart’s economic impact mainly concerns its
short- and medium-run partial-equilibrium effects, but as Wal-Mart enters more
8
Wal-Mart withdrew its application to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to open a
bank in March 2007, but it continues to provide various financial services, both directly and through
partnerships with existing banks.
and more markets, the general equilibrium interactions in markets as a whole

could become substantial. In the long run, Wal-Mart’s impact on local, national,
and global economies will depend on the general-equilibrium responses of other
firms, consumers, workers, and governments and on the strategic interactions
between these players and Wal-Mart.
y I thank Saku Aura, Frank Fisher, Mark Lewis, Peter Mueser, Pham Hoang Van, and Jeff
Wilder for helpful conversations, Peyton Craighill of the Pew Research Center for special
tabulations of a Pew survey, and Timothy Taylor for editorial comments that significantly
improved the paper.
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Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 21, Number 3—Summer 2007—Pages 177–198

The Causes and Consequences

W al-Mart plays a large and ever-growing role in the U.S. economy. As of

y Emek Basker is Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Missouri, Columbia,

Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico,

(a) 1965 (b) 1973

(c) 1981 (d) 1989

(e) 1997 (f) 2005

(a) 1990 (b) 1995

(c) 2000 (d) 2005

compares growth in real dollar sales per worker in the general-merchandise

General merchandise General merchandise sector

Sales, 1982 (millions of $) 252,217 6,833 245,384

Consumers favor Wal-Mart for its lower prices. Answering an open-ended

Inevitably, in a competitive environment, the emergence of a more-efficient

Large Retail Chain Competitors

Wal-Mart and Government Policy

Wal-Mart’s productivity advantage due to its large and early investment in

and more markets, the general equilibrium interactions in markets as a whole

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3? Useem, Jerry. 2003. “One Nation under Wal-

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