![Sample our Economics, Finance,Business & Industry journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5931/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Economics-Finance-Business-Industry.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Using web-scraping, we have gathered daily data on prices and product availability for over 50,000 unique food items from 7 major retailers in Poland since January 2020. We find a 24% drop in product availability during the first COVID-19 wave in April 2020. Next, with two-step and iterative GMM applied to a variety of specifications, we show a modest price response to stockouts, as a 10% decline in food product availability leads to an immediate 0.5% rise in prices throughout the first COVID-19 wave. During the subsequent pandemic waves, this link disappears. We also detect only a 4% drop in product availability following the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, thus we suspect that the recent price movements are linked primarily to cost and demand factors. Our evidence is indicative of retailers fearing consumer anger during unorthodox times.
Acknowledgements
The views expressed in this paper are those of their authors and do not necessarily correspond to the opinions of Narodowy Bank Polski. The authors would like to thank the Editor and two anonymous referees for their comments that improved the quality of the paper. The authors also express their gratitude to prof. Alberto Cavallo and prof. Michał Rubaszek for their remarks on earlier drafts of the paper. All remaining errors are the authors’ sole responsibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 COICOP, i.e. the Classification of Individual Consumption by Purpose, is a methodology employed by statistical offices to group individual consumption expenditures incurred by households.
2 Including further COVID-19 waves as interactions does not affect our results.