Estimating the Border Effect: Some New Evidence

Gita Gopinath, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas (), Hsieh, Chang-Tai and Nicholas Li

No 7281, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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.

Keywords: barcode data; border effect; law of one price; market segmentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F40 F41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba
Date: 2009-04
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Related works:
Working Paper: Estimating the border effect: some new evidence (2009)
Working Paper: Estimating the Border Effect: Some New Evidence (2009)
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