Does Wal-Mart reduce social capital?

Abstract

Wal-Mart, Social capital, Community, Retail, A10, A13, D00, Z1,

Supersizing supercenters? The impact of Walmart Supercenters on body mass index and obesity

“…5 This information was obtained from http://walmartstores.com/AboutUs/ 7606.aspx, http://walmartstores.com/AboutUs/7605.aspx, and http://walmartstores.com/sites/AnnualReport/2009/financial_highlights.html. 6 More extensive reviews of the literature on Walmart can be found in Basker (2005b), Basker (2007), Hicks (2007), and Carden et al (2009a). 7 These different conclusions hinge on a methodological debate that we detail in Section 3.…”

“…The data were used in Holmes (2008). 14 For examples, see Basker (2005a), Goetz and Rupasingha (2006), Goetz and Swaminathan (2006), Sobel and Dean (2008), and Carden et al (2009a), Carden et al (2009b). 15 We thank the Center for Disease Control for making the restricted data available.…”

“…Recent papers by three different groups of authors have utilized variations of this approach to identify Walmart's impacts: Neumark et al (2008) found a negative effect on retail employment, Dube et al (2007) found negative effects on retail earnings and health benefits, and Carden et al (2009a) found no effect on social capital. Identifying Walmart's effect using the interaction of time and distance from Benton County is appealing for several reasons.…”

“…Southern states do on average have higher obesity rates than other states (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009).Of course, some of this difference could be the causal effect of Walmart, while much of the remaining regional variation should be captured by the county fixed effects, controls for potential confounders such as income and education, and density à year interactions. Also, while Bentonville is technically in the south, its location in the northwest corner of Arkansas is less than 500 miles from the geographic center of the US Columbus, GA and Denver, CO are nearly equidistant from Bentonville, as are Shreveport, LA and Saint Louis, MO as well as Knoxville, TN and Madison, WI (Carden et al, 2009a). Nonetheless, the possibility for bias remains.…”

Social capital, lobbying and community-based interest groups

“…Similarly, Jottier and Heynelds (forthcoming) argue that social capital increases the benefits and lowers the cost of instrumental voting, thus increasing political accountability and government performance. Likewise, Putnam (1995), Poulsen and Svendsen (2005), Carden et al (2009) and Chong et al (2010aChong et al ( , 2010b view social capital as promoting social cooperation and worry about its development or deterioration.…”