Determinants of Retailers’ Economic Activity in the Roll Back of Mask Mandates During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This research paper explores the impact of an exogeneuous policy shock, which is the change of mask mandates policy, on Walmart’s economic activity during the pandemic. This paper also examine the role of partisanship, trust in science in consumers’ behavior in retailers through the use of panal data regression. I incorporate a dummy variable into the regression models, which takes the value 0 before the policy change and 1 after the policy change. I also incorporate two variables, vaccine hesitancy, voting share of the Republican Party into the regressions, and then interate them with the dummy variable. According to the results, people tended to go to Walmart stores more in counties with a higher vaccine hesitancy rate. The increase in the voting share of the Republican Party has a negative impact on the number of visitors in a Walmart.