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Estimating the Border Effect: Some New Evidence

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  • Gita Gopinath
  • Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas
  • Chang-Tai Hsieh
  • Nicholas Li

Abstract

To what extent do national borders and national currencies impose costs that segment markets across countries? To answer this question we use a dataset with product level retail prices and wholesale costs for a large grocery chain with stores in the U.S. and Canada. We develop a model of pricing by location and employ a regression discontinuity approach to estimate and interpret the border effect. We report three main facts: 1) The median absolute retail price and whole-sale cost discontinuity between adjacent stores on either side of the U.S.-Canada border is as high as 21%. In contrast, within-country border discontinuity is close to 0%; 2) The variation in the retail price gap at the border is almost entirely driven by variation in wholesale costs, not by variation in markups; 3) The border gap in prices and costs co-move almost one to one with changes in the U.S.-Canada nominal exchange rate. We show these facts suggest that the price gaps we estimate provide only a lower bound on border costs.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14938.

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Date of creation: Apr 2009
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14938

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  1. Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Linda L. Tesar, 2009. "Border Effect or Country Effect? Seattle May Not Be So Far from Vancouver After All," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 1(1), pages 219-41, January.
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  5. Parsley, David & Wei, Shang-Jin, 2004. "A Prism into the PPP Puzzles: The Micro-Foundations of Big Mac Real Exchange Rates," CEPR Discussion Papers 4486, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  6. Kenneth Rogoff, 1996. "The Purchasing Power Parity Puzzle," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 34(2), pages 647-668, June.
  7. Goldberg, PK & Verboven, Frank, 2005. "Market integration and convergence to the Law of One Price: evidence from the European car market," Open Access publications from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven urn:hdl:123456789/99322, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
  8. Engel, C. & Rogers, J.H., 1995. "How Wide is the Border?," Papers 4-95-16, Pennsylvania State - Department of Economics.
  9. Pinelopi K. Goldberg & Michael M. Knetter, 1996. "Goods Prices and Exchange Rates: What Have We Learned?," NBER Working Papers 5862, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  10. Guido Imbens & Thomas Lemieux, 2007. "Regression Discontinuity Designs: A Guide to Practice," NBER Working Papers 13039, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  11. Emi Nakamura, 2008. "Pass-Through in Retail and Wholesale," NBER Working Papers 13965, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  12. Jonathan Haskel & Holger Wolf, 2001. "The Law of One Price - A Case Study," NBER Working Papers 8112, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  13. Mario Crucini & Chris Telmer & Marios Zachariadis, . "Understanding European Real Exchange Rates," GSIA Working Papers 227, Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business.
  14. Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg & Frank Verboven, 1998. "The Evolution of Price Dispersion in the European Car Market," NBER Working Papers 6818, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  15. Thomas J. Holmes, 1998. "The Effect of State Policies on the Location of Manufacturing: Evidence from State Borders," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 106(4), pages 667-705, August.
  16. d'Aspremont, C & Gabszewicz, Jean Jaskold & Thisse, J-F, 1979. "On Hotelling's "Stability in Competition"," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(5), pages 1145-50, September.
  17. Marcus Asplund & Richard Friberg, 2001. "The Law of One Price in Scandinavian Duty-Free Stores," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(4), pages 1072-1083, September.
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  1. Estimating the border effect: some new evidence
    by Martin Berka in NEP-OPM blog on 2009-10-18 21:04:17
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Cited by:
  1. Charles Engel, 2010. "Exchange rate policies," BIS Papers chapters, in: Bank for International Settlements (ed.), The international financial crisis and policy challenges in Asia and the Pacific, volume 52, pages 229-250 Bank for International Settlements.
  2. Klenow, Peter J. & Malin, Benjamin A., 2010. "Microeconomic Evidence on Price-Setting," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: Benjamin M. Friedman & Michael Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 6, pages 231-284 Elsevier.
  3. Jean Boivin & Robert Clark & Nicolas Vincent, 2010. "Virtual Borders: Online Nominal Rigidities and International Market Segmentation," NBER Working Papers 15642, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  4. Georg H. Strasser, 2010. "The Efficiency of the Global Markets for Final Goods and Productive Capabilities," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 766, Boston College Department of Economics, revised 31 Jan 2012.
  5. Thierry Mayer & Philippe Martin & Nicolas Berman, 2010. "How do different exporters react to exchange rate changes? Theory, empirics and aggregate implications," 2010 Meeting Papers 1338, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  6. Hakan Yilmazkuday, 2012. "How wide is the border across U.S. states?," Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, Springer, vol. 5(1), pages 25-31, March.

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