Assessing the Gains from E-Commerce

Paul Dolfen, Liran Einav, Peter J. Klenow, Benjamin Klopack, Jonathan D. Levin, Larry Levin and Wayne Best

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2023, vol. 15, issue 1, 342-70

Abstract: E-commerce represents a rapidly growing share of consumer spending in the United States. We use transactions-level data on credit and debit cards from Visa, Inc. between 2007 and 2017 to quantify the resulting consumer surplus. We estimate e-commerce reached 8 percent of consumption by 2017, yielding the equivalent of a 1 percent boost to their consumption, or over $1,000 per household per year. While some of the gains arose from avoiding travel costs to local merchants, most of the gains stemmed from substituting to merchants available online but not locally. Higher income consumers gained more, as did consumers in more densely populated counties.

JEL-codes: D12 E21 G51 L81 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Working Paper: Assessing the Gains from E-Commerce (2019)
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DOI: 10.1257/mac.20210049

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