Online food prices and shocks to product availability since Covid-19

Damian Stelmasiak, Karol Szafranek, Paweł Macias and Aneta Błażejowska

Applied Economics Letters, 2024, vol. 31, issue 16, 1528-1534

Abstract: Using web-scraping, we have gathered daily data on prices and product availability for over 50,000 unique food items from 7 major retailers in Poland since January 2020. We find a 24% drop in product availability during the first COVID-19 wave in April 2020. Next, with two-step and iterative GMM applied to a variety of specifications, we show a modest price response to stockouts, as a 10% decline in food product availability leads to an immediate 0.5% rise in prices throughout the first COVID-19 wave. During the subsequent pandemic waves, this link disappears. We also detect only a 4% drop in product availability following the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, thus we suspect that the recent price movements are linked primarily to cost and demand factors. Our evidence is indicative of retailers fearing consumer anger during unorthodox times.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2023.2203444

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