Entry barriers in Italian retail trade

Fabiano Schivardi and Eliana Viviano ()
Additional contact information
Eliana Viviano: Banca d�Italia

No 616, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: The 1998 reform of the Italian retail trade sector delegated to the regional governments the regulation of entry of large retail shops. We use the local variation in regulation to determine the effects of entry barriers on firm performance for a representative sample of medium and large retail outlets. Using a diff-in-diff approach, we find that entry barriers are associated with substantially higher profit margins and substantially lower productivity of incumbent firms. We also find that liberalizing entry has a positive effect on investment in ICT, which the recent literature has shown to be the main driver of the remarkable sectoral productivity growth in the US. Finally, in the most liberal regions yearly inflation in the CPI component �food and beverages� was approximately half a percentage point lower than in the other regions: higher productivity coupled with lower margins resulted in lower consumer prices.

Keywords: entry barriers; productivity growth; technology adoption; retail trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 L5 L81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-eec, nep-eff, nep-ind and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/temi-disc ... 0616/en_tema_616.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_616_07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().