Walmart

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES

THE DIFFUSION OF WAL-MART AND ECONOMIES OF DENSITY Thomas J. Holmes Working Paper 13783 http://www.nber.org/papers/w13783

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 February 2008

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. I am grateful to for NSF Grant 0551062 for support of this research. I have benefited from the comments of many seminar participants. In particular, I thank Glenn Ellison, Gautam Gowrisankaran and Avi Goldfarb for their comments as discussants and Ariel Pakes for advice on how to think about this problem. I thank Junichi Suzuki, Julia Thornton, David Molitor, and Ernest Berkas for research assistance. I thank Emek Basker for sharing data. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2008 by Thomas J. Holmes. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES

THE DIFFUSION OF WAL-MART AND ECONOMIES OF DENSITY Thomas J. Holmes Working Paper 13783 http://www.nber.org/papers/w13783

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 February 2008

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. I am grateful to for NSF Grant 0551062 for support of this research. I have benefited from the comments of many seminar participants. In particular, I...