Cross-border shopping: evidence from household transaction records

Frédéric Kluser ()
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Frédéric Kluser: University of Bern

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, 2025, vol. 161, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: Abstract Cross-border shopping expands product variety and lowers prices for consumers in high-price countries, but it diminishes domestic tax revenues, reduces sales, and shifts demand away from local retailers. Exploiting Switzerland’s COVID-19-induced border closure as a natural experiment, I investigate the socioeconomic implications of cross-border shopping. Linking detailed grocery transaction records for 710,000 households to administrative data, I find that the border closure raises domestic grocery expenditures in border areas by an additional 10.4%. The benefits of cross-border shopping, however, are heterogeneous, and larger and lower-income households exhibit a particularly strong propensity to shop abroad. Based on these patterns, I estimate an annual loss of 1.5 billion Swiss francs in domestic grocery sales, equivalent to 3.8% of the total market.

Keywords: Cross-border shopping; Spatial consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L14 R1 R2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1186/s41937-025-00141-w

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