We use the entry of 17 external shopping malls in Sweden to investigate how they have affected the performance of incumbent firms located in the city centres of small cities. Estimating a traditional fixed effects regression model while controlling for firm-specific heterogeneity, we find that entry by external shopping malls decreased the labour productivity of incumbent firms in city centres by 5.31%. Revenues decrease by 6.62%, while the reduction in the number of employees (0.45%) is small and not significantly different from zero. However, using time-specific fixed effects to control for common time trends in retailing in small cities, we find that the impact on labour productivity, revenues and the number of employees due to the entry of external shopping malls becomes insignificant. Thus, incumbent firms in small cities have a negative development path mainly due to long-term economic trends, possibly because of the combination of urbanization effects and a lack of local investments.

我们使用瑞典 17 个外部购物中心的入口来调查它们如何影响位于小城市市中心的现有公司的业绩。在控制企业特定异质性的同时估计传统的固定效应回归模型，我们发现外部购物中心的进入使市中心现有企业的劳动生产率降低了 5.31%。收入减少了6.62%，而员工人数的减少（0.45%）很小，与零没有显着差异。然而，使用特定时间的固定效应来控制小城市零售业的普遍时间趋势，我们发现外部购物中心的进入对劳动生产率、收入和员工人数的影响变得不显着。因此，