The Wal‐Mart Effect: Wave of Destruction or Creative Destruction?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
abstract During the past quarter century, large multistore retailers have experienced considerable growth. In this article, we examine the widely held belief that the expansion of these chain stores, Wal‐Mart in particular, has had a large negative impact on the small locally owned retail sector. Our analysis of four types of independent retailer entries and exits in Florida from 1980, prior to the opening of the first Wal‐Mart store in the state, to 2004, reveals that Wal‐Mart's impact varies with independent retailers' market overlap with and proximity to Wal‐Mart. Notably, our findings suggest that within zip codes, the Wal‐Mart effect is driven by the suppression of entry rates, but not by the increase in exit rates, while in adjacent zip codes, it is driven by exit rates increasing more than entry rates. Our results provide empirical evidence that may help economic developers, public officials, and owners of small businesses make informed decisions about economic development in their communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".