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The Geography of Retail Inventory

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Author Info
Lai, Richard

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Abstract

How different are retailers' inventory levels around the world? Specifically, are retailers' inventories constant across countries, converging, or at least co-integrating? These might be viewed as various forms of global determinism. To see which of these forms hold, I use a novel dataset integrated from Dow Jones, Edgar, Bureau van Dijk (Europe), World'Vest Base, Multex, KIS (Korea Information Service), Teikoku of Japan, Huaxia of China, and COMPUSTAT. The dataset consists of 27,000 firm-year observations for 4,100 retailers in 23 countries, for the period 1983 through 2004. I find evidence to reject all the three forms of global determinism. Instead, I report evidence consistent with an alternative hypothesis - local contingency - in which country effects can explain inventory differences around the world. I also show that this conclusion is robust in numerous ways.

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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 4755.

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Date of creation: 21 Mar 2005
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:4755

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Related research
Keywords: Inventory retailing international comparison global determinism local contingency

Find related papers by JEL classification:
D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Capital and Total Factor Productivity; Capacity
E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information
M11 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Business Administration - - - Production Management

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  3. Goonatilake, Lalith, 1990. "Inventory management in the manufacturing sector in developing countries," Engineering Costs and Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1-3), pages 19-24, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Bernard, Andrew B & Jones, Charles I, 1996. "Comparing Apples to Oranges: Productivity Convergence and Measurement across Industries and Countries," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(5), pages 1216-38, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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