Assessing the Gains from E-Commerce

By P. Dolfen, Liran Einav, Peter J. Klenow, Benjamin Klopack, Jonathan Levin, Laurence M. Levin, Wayne Best. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2019

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 D12, E21, G51, L81, L86)

Subfields: Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fb818328601e21896d880c25063448a87f9ab71

Citations in the corpus

• Missing Growth from Creative Destruction (2017, unknown): “20 Following the methodology of Dolfen et al. (2018), we estimate σ by using the location of Visa cardholders vs.”
• Income Growth and the Distributional Effects of Urban Spatial Sorting (2019, unknown): “Atkin et al. (2018) find an elasticity of substitution of 3.9 for retail stores in Mexico, Einav et al. (2019) find 6.1 for offline stores in the U.S., Su (2018a) and Couture (2016) find 7.5 and 8.8 respectively for restaurants in the U.S.”