E-commerce and local labor markets: Is the “Retail Apocalypse” near?

Hyunbae Chun, Hailey Hayeon Joo, Jisoo Kang and Yoonsoo Lee

Journal of Urban Economics, 2023, vol. 137, issue C

Abstract: The rapid growth of e-commerce is widely blamed for job losses in brick-and-mortar retail. Using geographic variations in online spending, constructed from over 30 billion credit card transactions in Korea, we examine the causal effect of e-commerce on local retail employment. We find that the rise in the share of online spending from 2010 to 2015 decreased county-level retail employment by about 4.9 percent. We also find that employment shifted from offline retail to other local businesses, such as restaurants and personal services. However, the shift in employment was confined to metropolitan areas, falling far short of offsetting employment losses in non-metropolitan areas. Our finding suggests that a Retail Job Apocalypse is likely in certain local labor markets (i.e., non-metropolitan areas).

Keywords: E-commerce; Employment; Local labor market; Retail; Credit card (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 L81 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119023000645
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:juecon:v:137:y:2023:i:c:s0094119023000645

DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2023.103594

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Economics is currently edited by S.S. Rosenthal and W.C. Strange

More articles in Journal of Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().