Distance and Political Boundaries: Estimating Border Effects under Inequality Constraints

Fernando  Borraz; Alberto  Cavallo; Roberto  Rigobon; Leandro  Zipitria

Article | International Journal of Finance & Economics

Distance and Political Boundaries: Estimating Border Effects under Inequality Constraints

by Fernando Borraz, Alberto Cavallo, Roberto Rigobon and Leandro Zipitria

Abstract

The border effects literature finds that political boundaries have a large impact on relative prices across locations. In this paper we show that the standard empirical specification suffers from selection bias, and propose a new methodology based on binned-quantile regressions. We use a novel micro-price dataset from Uruguay and focus on city borders. We find that when the standard methodology is used, two supermarkets separated by 10 kilometers across two different cities have the same price dispersion as two supermarkets separated by 30 kilometers within the same city, implying that crossing a city border is equivalent to tripling the distance. By contrast, when upper quantiles are used the city border effect disappears. These findings imply that transport costs have been systematically underestimated by previous literature. Our methodology can be applied to measure any kind of border effect. We illustrate this in the context of online-offine price dispersion to measure an online border effect in the city of Montevideo.

Keywords: border effects; prices;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Borraz, Fernando, Alberto Cavallo, Roberto Rigobon, and Leandro Zipitria. "Distance and Political Boundaries: Estimating Border Effects under Inequality Constraints." International Journal of Finance & Economics 21, no. 1 (January 2016): 3–35.

In early 2020, a coronavirus pandemic swept the globe, ushering in unprecedented disruptions to the global economy. Both supply and demand were decimated by lockdowns and border closings, as well as reduced spending by fearful consumers. In response, governments around the world made equally unprecedented policy moves, spending trillions of dollars on fiscal stimulus measures to bridge the gap during the self-imposed shutdown. As the pandemic progressed, governments had to weigh the costs between loss of life due to opening up their economies and the economic devastation caused by delaying a reopening.

The HBS COVID-19 Global Policy Tracker is an initiative by the Business, Government and the International Economy (BGIE) unit at Harvard Business School (HBS) to collect and standardize economic policies implemented as a response to the coronavirus pandemic around the world. We focus on fiscal policy, monetary policy, and lockdowns and quantify government responses in common variables, units, and currencies to facilitate cross-country comparisons. The database is updated in real time with the efforts of several dozens of students at HBS and other Harvard schools.

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Distance and Political Boundaries: Estimating Border Effects under Inequality Constraints

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