This morning, I received word that my paper with Charles Courtemanche and Jeremy Meiners entitled "Does Wal-Mart Reduce Social Capital?" was accepted by Public Choice. An earlier version is available at SSRN, and our touched-up version should be available soon. The paper considers the argument that communities trade off quality-of-life in order to get Wal-Mart's low prices. We use the data Robert Putnam collected for his 2000 book Bowling Alone to show that there doesn't appear to be an identifiable, systematic relationship between Wal-Mart penetration and social capital.