Steve Horwitz offers an interesting post on a new Wal-Mart that just opened in Potsdam, New York. Steve is the author of a very interesting Mercatus Center piece on Wal-Mart's response to Hurricane Katrina.

Now I'll exploit this bit of serendipity to promote some of my own work. Anyone who fears that the new Potsdam Wal-Mart will destroy the community can rest easy. "Does Wal-Mart reduce social capital?", a paper I wrote with fellow Wash U alums Charles Courtemanche (now at UNC-Greensboro) and Jeremy Meiners (now at AGREM LLC) was published online yesterday and will appear in the print version of Public Choice soon. An ungated earlier version (very different, but with the same basic conclusions) is available on SSRN. The abstract:

Social capital has attracted increasing attention in recent years. We use county-level and individual survey data to study how Wal-Mart affects social capital. Estimates using several proxies for social capital—such as club membership, religious activity, time with friends, and other measures—do not support the thesis that “Wal-Mart destroys communities” by reducing social capital. We measure exposure to Wal-Mart two ways: Wal-Marts per 10,000 residents and Wal-Marts per 10,000 residents aggregated over the years since 1979 to capture a more cumulative “Wal-Mart Effect.” We find that the coefficients on Wal-Mart’s presence are statistically insignificant in most specifications.

In my reading of the Wal-Mart literature, the only strikes against Wal-Mart are their procurement of subsidies and this study by Stephan Goetz and Hema Swaminathan in which they argue that Wal-Mart increases county-level poverty rates, all other things equal. We plan to take another look at this hypothesis in the near future. Other criticisms have failed to withstand scrutiny.