【 The Digital Star Seminar Series No.18 】Big-Box Store Expansion and Consumer Welfare

Date: 6 May 2022 (Fri) 
Time: 9:00am - 10:30am (Hong Kong Time, UTC+8)
Platform: Tencent Meeting (ID 458-683-733)

Host: Prof. Miaojun Wang (School of Economics, Zhejiang University)

Presenter: Ms. Zhonglin Li (The University of Chicago)

Abstract：

Supercenters and warehouse clubs have grown rapidly in the US in recent decades. These big-box retail establishments are physically large to enable one-stop shopping, offering a broad range of product categories with relatively low prices. In this paper, we study how the entry of these big-box stores affect household consumption and welfare. We first present an event study of the store entries of four major big-box retail chains to provide empirical evidence that households change various dimensions of their shopping behavior, such as product varieties per shopping trip and prices paid, in ways that are strongly consistent with store characteristics. We then develop a novel multi-store multi-category choice model to quantify and disentangle the effects of product variety, prices, and other store characteristics on consumer welfare. We show that households benefit substantially from consuming in supercenters relative to competing retailers, highlighting the importance of the store format.

Intro to the Presenter:

Zhonglin Li is a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She will join the Department of Real Estate at the National University of Singapore as an Assistant Professor in July 2022. Her primary research interests are in the fields of industrial organization and urban economics.

Organization：

- The Chinese University of Hong Kong-Zhejiang University Joint Research Center for Digital Economy

- China Digital Economy Research Center of School of Economics, Zhejiang University

- Zhejiang University Digital Economy Innovation Research Team

Intro to The Digital Star Seminar Series：

The Digital Star Seminar Series is co-hosted by the China Digital Economy Research Center of School of Economics, Zhejiang University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong-Zhejiang University Joint Research Center for Digital Economy. This series of seminars will study the development of the digital economy and China's economic transformation based on the practice of China's digital transformation. We will invite domestic and overseas scholars to share and discuss the latest research on the digital economy and the Chinese economy. We hope that this academic platform can become a paradise for the study of the digital economy. More importantly, it can generate insights that significantly impact the digital economy and Chinese economy, which will help promote digital transformation and high-quality economic development in Chinese society.