Wal-Mart tends to be viewed by consumers as savior or Satan. The site location, employment and pricing policies of Wal-Mart stores generate so much controversy in community after community -- including Columbia, where founder Sam Walton used to reside and his heirs still do -- that any researcher, however neutral, exploring their ethos is sure to win ardent supporters or accrue determined detractors. All depending, of course, upon how they interpret their findings. Basker plays down her predictive powers. For example, she says, "My research does not shed light on what will happen with another Wal-Mart in Columbia. The research is about the average effect of a Wal-Mart store; most of the stores in my sample are not supercenters, and most are the first Wal-Mart stores in a city or county. And of course the average effect is not what you see happen in any given location, just an average."

Did Basker realize she would be making herself a magnet for praise and criticism by choosing Wal-Mart as a research subject? Eventually, she says, yes. But she never sought controversy. Born in 1970, her path to research related to Wal-Mart began inadvertently in the early 1990s, when she enrolled at the University of North Carolina. She dabbled with several majors, finally choosing economics because the introductory course "asked me to think in ways courses in other majors did not."

In 1996, after earning her bachelor's degree in economics, Basker began graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where economics students are expected to move through the equivalent of a master's degree directly to a doctorate. She impressed Professor Olivier Blanchard, who became one of her dissertation advisers.

"I think of her as a young Sherlock Holmes," Blanchard says. "She has the ability to see things others don't. She is exhaustive in her research for clues. And she is unusually thorough in her review of the evidence. But she is less pompous than Holmes."

Her character, including the lack of pomposity, won Basker acclaim at MIT. "She is a great human being," Blanchard says. "She is more together than most of the thesis advisees I have had. ... She knows who she is. This is, I am sure, one of the reasons she was so popular with graduate students as a teaching assistant, and why she won the best teacher award."

Basker's dissertation consists of three essays deemed publishable in academic journals. Basker's essays focused on local labor markets. She was not specifically thinking about Wal-Mart at that juncture. But given Wal-Mart's status as the largest private-sector employer in the United States, Basker found herself bumping into it wherever she turned.

Her dissertation benefited from a semester-long fellowship during the fall of 2001 at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The fellowship was Basker's introduction to Missouri. Like most of her MIT classmates, she applied to as many as 100 potential employers around the globe. When MU responded positively, she accepted. Basker views herself as doing research "at the intersection of macroeconomics -- the study of prices, inflation, employment patterns, innovation on a large, economy-wide scale -- and industrial organization, which looks at the micro level, the role of firms in setting prices, hiring people, adopting new technologies."