Article #14: Walmart and Systems
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!