Wal-Mart and Values: Painting the Town Red?

Carden, Art; Courtemanche, Charles; Meiners, Jeremy

doi:10.2139/ssrn.996164

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Other critics have argued that Wal‐Mart and Big‐Box retailers lead to “cultural impoverishment of communities” (Strasser, 2006, p. 55), and Hoopes (2006, p. 95) argues that “(a)nother increasingly widespread and largely justified critique of Wal‐Mart is that it is bad for the social fabric.”Dicker (2005) argues that Wal‐Mart is covertly foisting a conservative political agenda on the country—the company does not carry adult‐oriented magazines like Maxim, FHM, and Stuff—and right‐wing groups have criticized Wal‐Mart for its decision to join the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, a decision which they recently reversed. Carden, Courtemanche, and Meiners (2008b) fail to detect a systematic relationship between Wal‐Mart penetration and individual political, religious, and moral values, suggesting that the cultural spillovers from the Wal‐Mart economy are less pronounced than popular discourse might suppose.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 92%

“…This essay continues Carden, Courtemanche, and Meiners (2008a, 2008b) line of inquiry into some of the subtler effects and spillovers associated with Wal‐Mart’s expansion. This essay considers explicitly how Wal‐Mart affects the way people spend their time by comparing activities that Wal‐Mart makes cheaper to activities that do not involve the Wal‐Mart product line.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 95%

“…2 2 This section is adapted from the literature reviews in Carden, Courtemanche, and Meiners (2008a, 2008b). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Wal‐mart, Leisure, and Culture

Carden

Courtemanche

2009

Contemporary Economic Policy

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

"This essay contributes to the debate about the alleged spillover effects associated with Wal-Mart's growth. Combining county-level data on Wal-Mart entry and location from 1985 through 1998 with individual-level data on leisure activities, we estimate a positive relationship between Wal-Mart penetration and participation in activities involving inputs that can be bought at Wal-Mart. The relationship between Wal-Mart penetration and activities that do not involve inputs that can be bought at Wal-Mart is negative in most cases but may be positive or zero for "cultural" activities such as attending classical music concerts and visiting art galleries. The evidence is consistent with the thesis that deeper Wal-Mart penetration expands consumption possibilities."("JEL"A13, D00, C12, Z11, Z13) Copyright (c) 2009 Western Economic Association International.

show abstract

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 95%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Wal‐mart, Leisure, and Culture

Carden

Courtemanche

2009

Contemporary Economic Policy

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

When Walmart Comes to Town: Always Low Housing Prices? Always?

Pope

2012

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Walmart often faces strong local opposition when trying to build a new store. Opponents often claim that Walmart lowers nearby housing prices. In this study we use over one million housing transactions located near 159 Walmarts that opened between 2000 and 2006 to test if the opening of a Walmart does indeed lower housing prices. Using a difference-in-differences specification, our estimates suggest that a new Walmart store actually increases housing prices by between 2 and 3 percent for houses located within 0.5 miles of the store and by 1 to 2 percent for houses located between 0.5 and 1 mile. IntroductionOne of the most significant changes over the past two decades in the U.S. retail market is the expansion of large box stores and supercenters. Walmart is the largest of these rapidly growing retailers and is currently the biggest private employer in the world.In the United States alone, Walmart currently operates more than 4,400 retail facilities and employs almost 1.4 million people. 1 Phone surveys suggest that 84% of households in the U.S. shop at Walmart in a given year with 42% of households reporting to be regular Walmart shoppers (Pew Research Center, 2005 period. In contrast to the county-level analyses conducted by most previous work on the impacts of Walmart, the micro-level nature of our dataset allows us to develop an identification strategy that can help us to overcome the potential endogeneity of the location and timing of Walmart openings. More specifically, we employ a difference-indifferences analysis that compares housing prices before and after a Walmart opens for areas very close to a newly built Walmart, to areas slightly farther away.The results from this analysis suggest that a new Walmart store increases nearby housing prices. Our primary analysis suggests that houses located within 0.5 miles of the store see increases in their prices of about 2-3 percent when comparing the two and a half years before the Walmart opened to the two and a half years after the opening. Houses between 0.5 and 1 mile from the Walmart see an increase of 1-2 percent. It does not 4 appear that these price impacts are caused by an abrupt increase in the number of houses that sold in the area or by a change in the composition of houses that sold. Furthermore, graphical evidence and falsification tests provide no evidence of a spurious, positive effect due to differential housing price growth at the Walmart location and are therefore supportive of a causal interpretation of our difference-in-differences estimates of the impact of Walmart on housing prices.The paper proceeds as follows. In section 2 we discuss the potential impacts of Walmart in terms of the value of accessibility and the costs of negative externalities. We proceed in section 3 to describe the key datasets used in our analysis. In section 4, we describe our empirical strategy for estimating the impact of Walmart on housing prices and in section 5, we present the results. Finally, we conclude in section 6. Accessibility and Externality Ef...

show abstract

Wal-Mart and Values: Painting the Town Red?

Cited by 2 publications

References 16 publications

Wal‐mart, Leisure, and Culture

Wal‐mart, Leisure, and Culture

When Walmart Comes to Town: Always Low Housing Prices? Always?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About