Goods market integration and border effects across European countries with a special focus on retail markets

最近的金融和债务危机重新引起了政治和学术界对欧洲联盟(EU)成员国之间的经济异质性和分化的兴趣，尤其是在加入欧洲货币联盟(EMU)的国家中。虽然现在有各种研究使用标准的高质量微观价格数据来检查整个美国(美国)的一体化程度。在欧洲和加拿大，使用可比欧洲价格数据的研究要么局限于极少的货物(见Fischer(2012))、极少的地点(见Engel和Rogers(2004))，要么主要是描述性的(见欧盟委员会(2011)或Kurkowiak(2012))。在获得高质量、多国家的欧洲微观价格数据集后，我们打算填补这一空白，并对欧洲商品市场的运作获得有价值的新见解。在此背景下，我们将解决的问题包括评估欧盟国家在其单一市场战略背景下进行的一体化努力，比较欧洲货币联盟和欧盟国家之间边界的重要性，以及评估文化亲和力对跨国零售购物的作用。然而，我们的贡献将不仅限于使用新数据，我们还打算对现有文献做出几个概念和方法上的贡献。首先，我们将开发和实施一个经济计量模型框架，该框架将克服内部一致性的问题，而最广泛使用的评估边界重要性的方法，即Engel和Rogers(1996)开发的方法(下文以ER表示)受到影响。此外，我们选择的方法将使我们能够检查欧洲本地零售市场之间的竞争性质，无论是在国内还是跨境。更具体地说，我们将使用非常灵活的空间计量模型和贝叶斯模型选择技术，分析零售市场之间的竞争在多大程度上可以被描述为局部竞争或全球竞争，以及边界在多大程度上阻碍了市场之间的竞争。在我们的第二个主要扩展中，我们打算提供更好的衡量边界造成的经济损失的指标。目前最流行的评估边界重要性的方法(追溯到ER的工作)不仅对所获得的参数估计具有很强的敏感性(因此经常导致不合理的结果)，而且不能代表严格意义上的经济福利衡量标准。为了我们的研究目的，采用产业组织和营销领域的新发展的计量经济学技术，使我们能够构建基于估计的消费者偏好参数的边界的显式经济成本度量。

The recent financial and debt crisis has renewed the political and academic interest in economic heterogeneity and divergence across member countries of the European Union (EU), and here in particular amongst those which have joined the European Monetary Union (EMU). While there exist various studies employing nowadays standardly used high-quality micro price data for examining the degree of integration across the United States (U.S.) and Canada, studies employing comparable European price data are either confined to very few goods (see, e.g., Fischer (2012)), very few locations (see, e.g., Engel and Rogers (2004)) or are of a mostly descriptive nature (see, e.g., European Commission (2011) or Kurkowiak (2012)). Having acquired access to a high-quality, multi-country European micro price data set we intend to fill this gap and obtain valuable new insights into the functioning of European goods markets. Issues that we will address in this context include an assessment of the integration efforts of EU countries conducted in the context of their Single Market strategy, a comparison of the importance of borders between EMU and EU countries and an assessment of the role which cultural affinities play for cross-country retail shopping.However, our contributions will not be confined to the use of new data, but we also intend to make several conceptual and methodological contributions to the existing literature. First, we will develop and implement an econometric model framework that will overcome the problem of internal consistency from which the most widely used approach to assess the importance of borders, i.e., the approach developed by Engel and Rogers (1996) (denoted by ER in the following) suffers. In addition, our chosen approach will allow us to examine the nature of competition between local European retail markets both within and across borders. More specifically, using a very flexible spatial econometric model and Bayesian model selection techniques, we will analyze to which extent competition across retail markets can be characterized either as being local or global and to which extent borders act as impediments to competition between markets.In our second major extension we intend to provide improved measures of the economic losses induced by borders. The most popular measure to evaluate the importance of borders at the moment (which goes back to the work by ER) not only suffers from its strong sensitivity to the obtained parameter estimates (and therefore often leads to unreasonable results) but also does not represent an economic welfare measure in a strict sense. Adopting newly developed econometric techniques from the fields of industrial organization and marketing to the purpose of our studies enables us to construct explicit economic cost measures of borders which are derived from estimated consumer preference parameters.