Data and Code for: "Assessing the Gains from E-Commerce"

E-commerce represents a rapidly growing share of consumer spending in the U.S. We use transactions-level data on credit and debit cards from Visa, Inc. between 2007 and 2017 to quantify the resulting consumer surplus. We estimate e-commerce reached 8% of consumption by 2017, yielding the equivalent of a 1% boost to their consumption, or over $1,000 per household per year. While some of the gains arose from avoiding travel costs to local merchants, most of the gains stemmed from substituting to merchants available online but not locally. Higher income consumers gained more, as did consumers in more densely populated counties. This package includes replication code to reproduce the tables and figures in the paper.