Are New Shopping Centers Drivers of Development in Large Metropolitan Suburbs? The Interplay of Agglomeration and Competition Forces

Oana Mihaescu (), Martin Korpi () and Özge Öner ()
Additional contact information
Martin Korpi: The Ratio Institute, Postal: The Ratio Institute, P.O. Box 5095, SE-102 42 Stockholm, Sweden, http://www.ratio.se
Özge Öner: University of Cambridge

No 332, Ratio Working Papers from The Ratio Institute

Abstract: We investigate to which extent shopping centers drive local economic development by studying how distance to newly established shopping centers affects the performance of incumbent firms, located in the suburbs of the three Swedish major metropolitan areas Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, 2000-2016. We use a regression setup with around 27,000 firm-year observations and explore the possible heterogeneity imposed on the results from two main elements of spatial economics theory: the size of the new retail area and the distance from the new retail area to the analyzed incumbents. We observe a clear difference in the direction of the effects of large versus small shopping centers. While competition forces are much stronger in the case of the establishment of large shopping centers, yielding a negative 5% on incumbent firm revenue and negative 3% on firm employment, results indicate the opposite pattern for smaller shopping centers; with firm revenue and firm employment increasing 4% and 3%, respectively. Moreover, we also observe that both agglomeration and competition effects attenuate sharply with distance from the new entrant, confirming one of the central premises of retail location theory. Finally, we observe that the geographical scope of the effects is much wider in the case of larger shopping centers, with estimates becoming statistically insignificant at about 9-10 km from the new entry, as compared to 3-4 km in the case of smaller retail centers.

Keywords: Shopping centers; firm performance; retail location; agglomeration effects; competition; attenuation of effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 L25 P25 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2020-04-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-sbm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ratio.se/app/uploads/2020/04/working-paper-no-332.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ratio.se/app/uploads/2020/04/working-paper-no-332.pdf [308 Permanent Redirect]--> https://ratio.se/app/uploads/2020/04/working-paper-no-332.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Are new shopping centers drivers of development in large metropolitan suburbs? The interplay of agglomeration and competition forces (2020)
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:hhs:ratioi:0332

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ratio Working Papers from The Ratio Institute The Ratio Institute, P.O. Box 5095, SE-102 42 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martin Korpi ().