演講者簡介 : Professor Kai-Jie Wu received his PhD from the University of Rochester in 2023. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are Macroeconomics, Growth, and Labor.
演講摘要 : Do larger firms operate in larger markets? This paper studies the sorting between firms and locations in U.S. retailing. I decompose retailers' production in a particular location into firm- and location-fixed effects (FE). A firm is assigned a larger FE if it produces more than other firms in the same markets; a location is assigned a larger FE if firms tend to produce more in this market than they do in other markets. I find a U-shaped relation: large- and small-FE retailers tend to operate in large-FE markets, while middle-FE retailers tend to operate in small-FE markets. I argue that the U-shaped sorting points toward models where profits depend on firms' market share in their operating locations, such as Kimball demand or oligopolistic competition. By incorporating the U-shape sorting, these models alter previous studies' predicted implications of the spatial expansion in retailing and placed-based policies that target small markets.
