CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

The Role of Retail Chains: National, Regional, and Industry Results

December 2005

Working Paper Number:

CES-05-30

Abstract

We use the establishment level data in the Longitudinal Business Database to measure changes in market structure in the U.S. Retail Trade sector during the period, 1976 to 2000. We use firm ownership information to construct measures of firm entry and exit and also to categorize four types of retail firms: single location, and local, regional, and national chains. We use detailed location data to examine market structure in both national and county markets. We summarize the county level results into three groups: metropolitan, micropolitan, and rural. We find that retail activity is increasingly occurring at establishments owned by chain firms, especially large national chains. On average, we find that all types of retail firms are increasing in size during the period. We also find that larger markets experience more firm turnover. Finally, we see that entry and exit rates vary across two-digit retail industries.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
market, sale, sector, firms census, recession, establishment, retailer, wholesale, buyer, retail, store

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

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:
Standard Statistical Establishment List, Internal Revenue Service, Standard Industrial Classification, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Longitudinal Research Database, Center for Economic Studies, Office of Management and Budget, Permanent Plant Number, County Business Patterns, Longitudinal Business Database, Retail Trade, Chicago Census Research Data Center, Employer Identification Numbers, Census of Retail Trade, Wal-Mart, Social Security, Economic Census, Research Data Center, North American Industry Classification System, Census Bureau Business Register, Core Based Statistical Area

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