Three Essays on Street-Level Businesses
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Zhang_vzhang3_Management_2026_thesis.pdf
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9.37 MB
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c60a73e8aca4b0fddefa2cdd3db7742a
Author(s)
Zhang, Victoria Yiluan
Advisor(s)
Wilmers, Nathan
Date Issued
May 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This dissertation examines street-level businesses and the social and economic forces that shape success on U.S. main streets. Many excellent studies of these forces have employed qualitative or ethnographic accounts. I use comprehensive cell-phone and transactionlevel data from SafeGraph covering 12 million U.S. establishments from 2019–2025, to generalize these accounts and develop theory connecting the behavior of local populations to aggregate patterns discussed here. The first e ssay explains why minority entrepreneurs face disadvantages, not only as a function of their human, social, or financial capital, but also as a function of customer demand in their local neighborhoods. A stacked difference-indifferences a nalysis s hows t hat t his partly r eflects th e lower in come le vels of cu stomers in their neighborhoods: businesses with customers who received stimulus checks (because they earned less than the eligibility threshold) saw greater revenues in the months following the disbursements compared to businesses attracting higher-income customers who did not receive these checks. The second essay asks whether digital platforms present opportunities for business owners to reach new audiences and capture market share in new geographic locations. By instrumenting for the penetration of a digital platform that allows entrepreneurs to easily connect credit card payments with their personal bank accounts, I show that new technologies do encourage geographically dispersed entrepreneurship, but primarily within higher-income areas. The third essay examines how customers’ local interpretations of street-level businesses differ from their national partisan i dentity. To do this, I examine the extent to which national partisan consumption patterns percolate to local brick-and-mortar establishments. I find that social observability, brand moderation, and cognitive dissonance all play important roles in reducing consumers’ alignment with their brands’ ideological choices. Taken together, the chapters make the case that street-level businesses are a uniquely useful lens to approach questions about inequality, the uneven penetration of digital technology into local economies, and everyday social life. Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Geographic inequality, Spatial decomposition, Technological change, Partisanship
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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