At MU, Basker teaches graduate-level courses in macroeconomics and in game theory, the study of strategic behavior in competitive situations. She has also led undergraduates through a capstone course in which they discuss government policy by dissecting wrongheaded newspaper editorials, among other materials.

After arriving at MU, Basker's first significant writing, a Department of Economics working paper, carried the title "Education, Job Search and Migration," which was a revised version of an MIT dissertation chapter. She validated that job-searching behavior, including leaving the home base during and after the quest, differs from educational group to educational group. Basker began with the information that "the propensity to migrate increases with education." Furthermore, she knew that migrating workers with high education tend to move with a job offer in hand more frequently than workers with less education. Beginning with those facts, Basker generated predictions, such as the idea that less-educated workers would show greater sensitivity to local economic conditions when deciding whether to leave the area.

Then Basker shifted her research emphasis, hoping to better understand what happened in communities after large new retailers entered the market. That meant Wal-Mart, pretty much by definition. She knew that a few academics at other universities had been examining the localized effects of a Wal-Mart coming to town, such as Kenneth E. Stone at Iowa State University. But Stone was conducting his research in isolated rural Iowa towns. Later, Stone expanded his information-gathering to Wal-Mart supercenters in selected Texas and Mississippi locales. He has been quoted in the popular media throughout the nation, but has never attempted to provide the big picture.

"Professor Basker is the first academic to conduct a nationwide study of the impact of Wal-Mart stores on local labor markets," says Stone, a professor emeritus of economics who retired last February. "Nearly every reporter I have ever talked with has asked me the impact of Wal-Mart on the local labor market. I had never studied this specifically, so I always took the easy way out and suggested that local employment was affected in direct proportion to the sales impacts that Wal-Mart caused. I believe that this is correct, but it was not satisfying to reporters who wanted specific numbers."

Stone notes that Basker "has used more sophisticated quantitative tools in analyzing the data than I or other researchers had used."

Kenneth R. Troske, one of Basker's MU colleagues and a faculty member who played a role in hiring her, says her sophisticated analysis is a key to why her work is getting attention. Previous researchers, Troske says, seemed to assume that Wal-Mart locates its stores randomly. That is not the case, of course. But before Basker the academic research failed to control for the purposefulness of Wal-Mart entering some markets and avoiding others.

Her research is filled with methodological terms unfamiliar to many non-economists ("split-sample instrumental variables specification," for example) as well as equations, maps, charts and graphs. Basker cannot be accused of presenting her findings in a sensationalistic manner, or even an especially accessible manner. But a reference to Wal-Mart is a reference to Wal-Mart -- which means plenty of attention outside academia, whether she welcomes it or not.