主题：沃尔玛与美国城市间的价格离散Wal-Mart and Price Dispersion Across U.S. Cities

主办单位：中国财政发展协同创新中心

时间：2017年4月12日（周三）12:30-14:00

地点：学术会堂603（学院南路）

主讲人：AKM Mahbub Morshed

美国南伊利诺伊大学，经济系，副教授（终身教职），英国华威大学（University of Warwick, UK），访问学者，发表多篇论文于：Journal of International Economics，Journal of Development Economics，Journal of International Money and Finance等

讲座概要:

The study examines the effect of Wal-Mart on price-dispersion in U.S. cities. Despite the fact that U.S. retail architecture has been changed over the past two decades by the expansion of big-box chain-stores, the role played by such rapidly-expanding chain-stores like Wal-Mart in price dispersion is completely over-looked in the literature. The possible symmetry in costs and mark-ups among Wal-Mart stores, and their influence over the city level prices motivate us to test if their presence helps reduce price dispersion in U.S. cities. After controlling for distance, local costs such as wage and rent, and city and time specific fixed effects this study finds that prices are significantly closer in two cities if they have Wal-Mart than if none or only one of them has Wal-Mart. Though the results are mostly robust to the analyses using disaggregate price data and sub-samples, they are more pronounced for grocery items than non-grocery items, within high income cities than low income cities. Moreover,we find a regional variation in Wal-Mart’s role in reducing price dispersion, and its relatively more prominent role in reducing inter-region rather than intra-region price dispersion. Since the presence of Wal-Mart reduces price dispersion and thus reduces the possible misallocation of resources, our results suggest that the existence of a positive welfare impact of Wal-Mart cannot be overruled.

[编辑]：张萌