Product Market Competition and Human Resource Practices: An Analysis of the Retail Food Sector
31 Pages Posted: 9 May 2005
Date Written: March 2005
Abstract
The rise of super-centers and the entry of Wal-Mart into food retailing have dramatically altered the competitive environment in the industry. This paper explores the impact of such changes on the labor market practices of traditional food retailers. We use longitudinal data on workers and firms to construct new measures of compensation and employment, and examine how these measures evolve within and across firms in response to changes in product market structure due to mass merchandiser entry. An additional feature of the analysis is the combination of rich case study knowledge about the retail food industry with the new matched employer-employee data from the Census Bureau.
Keywords: Human Resource Practices, Product Market Competition, WalMart, employer-employee data, retail food
JEL Classification: J310,J400, L100
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation