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Customer-Employee Substitution: Evidence from Gasoline Stations*
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-45R
We document the adoption of self-service pumps in U.S. gasoline stations from 1977 to 1992. Using establishment-level data from the Census of Retail Trade over this period, we show that self-service stations employ approximately one quarter fewer attendants per pump, all else equal. The work done by these attendants has shifted to customers, biasing upwards conventional measures of productivity growth.
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THE AGGREGATE IMPACT OF ONLINE RETAIL
April 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-23
To study the impact of online retail on aggregate welfare, I use a spatial model to calculate a new measure of store level retail productivity and each store's equilibrium response to increased competitive pressure from online retailers. The model is estimated on confidential store-level data spanning the universe of US retail stores, detailed local-level demographic data and shortest-route data between locations. From counterfactual exercises mimicking improvements in shipping and increased internet access, I estimate that improvements in online retail increased aggregate welfare from retail activities by 13.4 per cent. Roughly two-thirds of the increase can be attributed to welfare improvements holding fixed market shares, with the remainder due to reallocation. Surprisingly, 8.2 percent of firms actually benefit as they absorb market share from closed stores. Finally, I estimate that the proposed Marketplace Fairness Act would claw back roughly one-third of sales that would otherwise have gone to online retailers between 2007-12.
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TAKEN BY STORM: BUSINESS SURVIVAL IN THE AFTERMATH OF HURRICANE KATRINA
April 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-20
We use Hurricane Katrina's damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a cost shock. We find that damaged establishments that returned to operation were more resilient than those that had never been damaged. This effect is particularly strong for establishments belonging to younger and smaller rms. The effect of damage on establishments in older and larger chains was more limited, and they were subsequently less resilient having survived the damage. These selection effects persist up to five years after the initial shock. We interpret these findings as evidence that the effect of the shock is tied to the presence of financial and other constraints.
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WHO DO UNIONS TARGET? UNIONIZATION OVER THE LIFE-CYCLE OF U.S. BUSINESSES
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-09R
What type of businesses do unions target for organizing and when? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity, and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes unionized if the union targets it for organizing and wins the union certification election. The model predicts two main selection effects: unions target larger and more productive establishments early in their life-cycles, and among the establishments targeted, unions are more likely to win elections in smaller and less productive ones. These predictions find support in union certification elections data for 1977-2007 matched with data on establishment characteristics.
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Impacts of Central Business District Location: A Hedonic Analysis of Legal Service Establishments
July 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-21
This analysis examines the business impacts on law firms of locating in Central Business Districts (CBDs) in major U.S. cities. Specifically, we measure the price premium that law firms pay to locate in CBDs. Using micro-level data from the 1992 and 2007 Census of Services, we find that after controlling for firm size, firm specialization characteristics, and MSA and county attributes, law firms within CBDs pay about 15 to 20 percent more in overhead compared to those firms outside CBDs ' a result consistent across time between 1992 and 2007. When including an important additional measure of firm quality, however, we find that this impact is reduced to about 7 to 9 percent, but still statistically significant. Additional results show that there is a significant correlation between firm quality and CBD location. We also find that firm size and firm specialization measures are important factors in the choice to locate within CBDs. We argue that these results indicate that CBD location for law firms may serve as networking, quality sorting, and branding mechanisms.
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Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector
May 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-16R
Barcodes and barcode scanners transformed the grocery industry in the 1970s. I use store-level data from the 1972, 1977, and 1982 Census of Retail Trade, matched to data on store scanner installations, to estimate scanners' effect on labor productivity. I find that early scanners increased a store's labor productivity, on average, by approximately 4.5 percent in the first few years. The effect was larger in stores carrying more packaged products, consistent with the presence of network externalities. Short-run gains were small relative to fixed costs, suggesting that the impediment to widespread adoption of the new technology was profitability, not coordination problems.
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Supersize It: The Growth of Retail Chains and the Rise of the "Big Box" Retail Format
August 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-23R
This paper documents and explains the recent rise of "big-box" general merchandisers. Data from the Census of Retail Trade for 1977-2007 show that general-merchandise chains grew much faster than specialist retail chains, and that general merchandisers that added the most stores also made the biggest increases to their product offerings. We explain these facts with a stylized model in which a retailer's scale economies interact with consumer gains from one-stop shopping to generate a complementarity between a retailer's scale and scope.
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Measuring U.S. Innovative Activity
March 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-11
Innovation has long been credited as a leading source of economic strength and vitality in the United States because it leads to new goods and services and increases productivity, leading to better living standards. Better measures of innovative activities'activities including but not limited to innovation alone'could improve what we know about the sources of productivity and economic growth. The U.S. Census Bureau either currently collects, or has collected, data on some measures of innovative activities, such as the diffusion of innovations and technologies, human and organizational capital, entrepreneurship and other worker and firm characteristics, and the entry and exit of businesses, that research shows affect productivity and other measures of economic performance. But developing an understanding of how those effects work requires more than just measures of innovative activity. It also requires solid statistical information about core measures of the economy: that is, comprehensive coverage of all industries, including improved measures of output and sales and additional information on inputs and purchased materials at the micro (enterprise) level for the same economic unit over time (so the effects can be measured). Filling gaps in core data would allow us to rule out the possibility that a measure of innovative activity merely proxies for something that is omitted from or measured poorly in the core data, provide more information about innovative activities, and strengthen our ability to evaluate the performance of the entire economy. These gaps can be filled by better integrating existing data and by more structured collections of new data.
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The Production Decisions of Large Competitors: Detecting Cost Advantages and Strategic Behavior in Restaurants
July 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-19
This paper evaluates firm profitability in the highly competitive restaurant industry by comparing variation in firm size and production decisions with variation in market size. In the Census microdata, I find that multi-unit firms operate a greater number of restaurants and larger individual restaurants in larger MSAs. They also increase production intensity by increasing production during operating hours, extending operating hours, increasing the volume of meals and non-meals output. These results are generally consistent with full capacity exploitation in efficient firms, rather than underutilization by firms seeking to limit rivalry through excess capacity or product proliferation.
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Residual Claims and Incentives in Restaurant Chains
July 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-18
I examine the relationship between ownership and production activities using a new dataset of restaurant chains. Production in restaurant chains provides an opportunity to examine the effects of residual claims on incentives because production is decentralized and fairly uniform across restaurants in the same chain. Yet the allocation of residual claims varies between company-owned and franchised units, affecting the strength of incentives for restaurantlevel activities. The decision to own or franchise each restaurant reflects the value of either withholding or allocating residual claims for performing these activities. I find that more complex production activities are systematically correlated with company ownership. Onsite food production raises the likelihood of company ownership by 28% relative to offsite food production. Table service raises the likelihood of company ownership by 26% relative to counter service. The results are not consistent with straightforward effort-promoting effects of residual claims in simple principal agent models. They are consistent with the view that residual claims can generate unbalanced incentives across diverse tasks.
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