School of Finance and Economics The University of Technology Sydney
Graduate School of Economics The University of Tokyo
Faculty of Economics Hosei University
抄録
Past studies in the literature of the law of one price (LOP) show statistically significant but economically subtle roles of geographical distance in regional price dispersions. In this paper, we challenge this empirical "death of distance" as a primary source of LOP violations investigating a unique daily data set of wholesale prices of agricultural products in Japan that enables us to identify source regions and observe product-delivery patterns to consuming regions. We build a simple structural model to explain the observed product-delivery patterns and argue that ignoring the underlying delivery choice results in a serious under-bias toward inferences on distance effects on regional price dispersions due to sample selection. Estimating a sample-selection model, on which theoretical restrictions of our structural model are imposed, with data of several agricultural products, we find quite large estimates of the distance elasticity of price differential compared with conventional estimates. This paper, hence, provides evidence that conventional estimates of the distance elasticity could be heavily biased downwards and spuriously underestimate the role transportation costs play in regional price dispersions and LOP violations.
内容記述
Revised in May 2012; revised for publication in the Journal of International Economics.
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雑誌名
Discussion paper series. CIRJE-F
巻
CIRJE-F-760
発行年
2010-09
書誌レコードID
AA11450569
フォーマット
application/pdf
日本十進分類法
335
出版者
日本経済国際共同センター
出版者別名
Center for International Research on the Japanese Economy
Exaggerated Death of Distance : Revisiting Distance Effects on Regional Price Dispersions
