Discussion Boards

Justin Wiltshire, Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets, working paper, University of Victoria, available here. What are the effects of Walmart on local communities? The answers are potentially far-reaching, as Walmart's size and low costs affect prices but also the purchasing power of employees, relative to alternative jobs, and the entry/exit of related firms. To identify the effect of Walmart on all these things--that is, on the system--this paper compares counties where a Walmart Supercenter opened with set of localities that blocked a planned Supercenter from opening, and finds far-reaching effects. While the system-level analysis is the main reason to recommend this paper, the author's empirical approach also invites questions about experimental content, as the counties that blocked a Supercenter a few in number and unevenly distributed. For thinking about the concepts in my book, this paper is a two-fer!

Not really an article but a blog post by me on Goldin and Rouse's Blind Orchestra Auditions article (American Economic Review 90,4:715-741), discussed at length in Chapter 8. A number of commentators more or less simultaneously expressed grave reservations about the credibility of that article, and this post seeks to draw lessons from that. https://www.worldofeconomics.com/orchestra.html

Prevailing Party Laws and General Election Outcomes, Darren Grant, working paper (when posted) now published here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13475. Vernacular knowledge plays a key role in this working paper of mine that examines the effect of ballot order on vote share in nearly half a century of Wyoming elections. In previous research I had analyzed quasi-randomized ballot orders, as is standard in the literature, because they offer "clean identification." Never did I pause to think that these might have milder effects than other methods of ordering candidates--a possibility unconsidered in the literature. I had never taken in the body of existing research (largely in other fields) that describes the variety of possible framing effects that could be generated by ballot order. In that sense, I lacked the requisite vernacular knowledge. Two purposes of vernacular knowledge listed in Ch. 4 are to "indicate the relevance or irrelevance of economic and social forces" and gauging "the sensitivity of the model and its findings to the institutional social and technical environment." This article shows how vernacular knowledge can do both, making it a great complement to Article #11.