Assessing the Gains from E-Commerce
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
vol. 15,
no. 1, January 2023
(pp. 342-70)
Abstract
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.Citation
Dolfen, Paul, Liran Einav, Peter J. Klenow, Benjamin Klopack, Jonathan D. Levin, Larry Levin, and Wayne Best. 2023. "Assessing the Gains from E-Commerce." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 15 (1): 342-70. DOI: 10.1257/mac.20210049Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D12 Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
- E21 Macroeconomics: Consumption; Saving; Wealth
- G51 Household Finance: Household Saving, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth
- L81 Retail and Wholesale Trade; e-Commerce
- L86 Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
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