When Walmart comes to town: Always low housing prices? Always?

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2014.10.004 0094-1190/ 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. q We thank Emek Basker, Nick Kuminoff, Lars Lefgren, Chris Parmeter and Arden Pope and seminar participants at Brigham Young University, the summer meetings of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and the meetings of theWeimer/Seldin School for Advanced Studies, as well as colleagues at the University of Chicago and Brigham Young University for helpful discussions about this paper. We also thank Chris Bruegge and Brendan Forster for excellent research assistance on this project. The standard disclaimer applies. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (D.G. Pope), jaren_pope@byu. edu (J.C. Pope). 1 These numbers were taken from the August 2011 fact sheet provided on the Walmart website and can be found at http://www.walmartstores.com/pressroom/factsheets/. 2 The different findings in these studies depend primarily on the iden strategy employed to account for the potential endogeneity of the location an of Wal-Mart openings. See Basker (2007) and Neumark et al. (2008) for a disc these differences. 3 Basker’s (2007) overview article on the causes and consequences of W growth states that ‘‘Wal-Mart’s effects on local government expenditur sprawl, traffic, crime, and social capital have received some attention in discourse.’’ It also states that ‘‘places that have limited Wal-Mart’s entry ha cited its potential impact on urban sprawl, traffic, and congestion; however, is needed to test these claims.’’ Prominent concerns listed by opponents of on the internet include less local employment opportunities and lower wag property values, increased crime, traffic, congestion, noise and light pollutio example: http://www.corpethics.org/downloads/northcross_no_walmart.pd Devin G. Pope , Jaren C. Pope b,⇑