Exploring Spatial Price Relationships: The Case of African Swine Fever in China

Michael Delgado (), Meilin Ma () and H. Holly Wang

No 29141, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We use a temporary ban on inter-province shipping of live hogs induced by the 2018 outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in China as a natural experiment to study spatial mechanisms behind the dynamics of market integration. With a unique dataset of weekly provincial hog prices, we employ a novel spatial network model to estimate the strength of price co-movement across provinces pre and post the ban. Results indicate that, in the highly integrated national market prior to the ban, longer geographical distances between two provinces did not weaken the strength of their price linkage. The ban broken down spatial integration. Longer distances became a significant obstacle to spatial price linkage in the post-ban periods, implying faster re-integration of hog prices between proximate provinces than remote ones. The negative effect of distance can be rationalized by the interplay between arbitrage opportunities and imperfect information. Our findings highlight information transparency as a key to market integration post shipping bans used to curb animal pandemics like ASF.

JEL-codes: C22 C23 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna and nep-isf
Note: TWP
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Exploring Spatial Price Relationships: The Case of African Swine Fever in China , Michael Delgado, Meilin Ma, H. Holly Wang. in Risks in Agricultural Supply Chains , Antràs and Zilberman. 2023

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29141.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Exploring Spatial Price Relationships: The Case of African Swine Fever in China (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29141

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29141

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().