Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-1-2018

Abstract

In this paper retail sales will be used to help understand the consumer spending habits of micropolitan areas in the year 2000. The year 2000 was a big year for American consumers, it was at the turn of the century, some said that the world was ending; others said it was just the begging of a new technological era. This paper will take a look at many factors that could have affected the retail sales (i.e. consumer spending) in micropolitan areas, as well as be able to help explain the consumer confidence in the year 2000. Areas such as population growth, wages, sales tax, and poverty among many other things will help explain their effects on consumer spending. This paper will first take a look at what is consumer spending and consumer confidence, and then lead into a statistical model with multiple tests in order to analyze the numbers behind consumer spending in this year. Ordinary least squares regression will be used to help explain statistically what effected retail sales in the year 2000. The data used is from the US Census Bureau, and includes 554 micropolitan areas in the lower 48 states of America. Most studies previously conducted only analyze America as a whole of Metropolitan areas, this study is significant in finding effects on retail sales in micropolitan areas only. This study was rather inconclusive to the existing data. The model found that only sales tax and national amenity scale were significant to the study. In this paper we find that micropolitan areas have a hard time being measured based off retail sales alone. I would recommend further studies be conducted, however some findings in this model do exist.

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