Assessing the Gains from E-Commercet

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dolfen, Paul; Einav, Liran; Klenow, Peter J.; Klopack, Benjamin; Levin, Jonathan D.; Levin, Larry; Best, Wayne
• 署名单位: Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Texas A&M University System; Texas A&M University College Station; Stanford University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MACROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7707
• DOI: 10.1257/mac.20210049
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 342-370
• 关键词: product variety; online; prices; internet

摘要

E-commerce represents a rapidly growing share of consumer spend-ing 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 per-cent 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 mer-chants available online but not locally. Higher income consumers gained more, as did consumers in more densely populated counties. (JEL D12, E21, G51, L81, L86)