E-commerce: the end of offline retail? : A quantitative study on how online shopping habits affect the structure of the retail market
Abstract: The internet has provided us with a lot of things. One major thing is the convenience of buying goods online and get them delivered to us. Not only does the internet contain everything one might desire, but also where one can acquire it for the lowest possible price. In this thesis, this growing phenomenon, called e-commerce, is empirically studied. The main purpose is to examine the effect of e-commerce on the retail market in Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark). The thesis includes fixed and random effects models that describe the effect of e-commerce on the number of offline enterprises and fixed effect models that describes the effect of e-commerce on the average size of offline enterprises. According to earlier studies on this matter, e-commerce has mostly had a negative effect on the number of enterprises in the offline retail sector. The results differ, however, across the subsectors within retail. This is shown, for example, by Goldmanis et al. (2010). They studied the effect of e-commerce on different offline enterprises, categorised by their size, and found that e-commerce has a negative effect on smaller firms and a non-existent or even positive effect on bigger firms. Some of the results in this thesis are in line with these findings, while in some cases they are not. When using regional fixed or random effects only, it shows that e-commerce has a negative effect on the number of offline enterprises, and a positive effect on the average size of offline enterprises. The significance of e-commerce does, however, disappear when each year is isolated with year fixed effects. The results also suggest that the effect of e-commerce differs across the three countries included in the study.
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