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燃起了政治和学术对欧盟（EU）成员国之间经济异质性和分歧的兴趣，特别是那些加入欧洲货币联盟（EMU）的国家。虽然目前有各种研究采用标准使用的高质量微观价格数据来检查美国（美国）和加拿大的一体化程度，但采用可比较的欧洲价格数据的研究要么局限于极少数商品（参见，例如Fischer(2012)），要么局限于极少数地点（参见，例如Engel和Rogers(2004)），要么主要是描述性的（参见，例如，欧盟委员会（2011）或Kurkowiak(2012)）。在获得高质量、多国欧洲微观价格数据集后，我们打算填补这一空白，并获得有关欧洲商品市场运作的宝贵新见解。在此背景下，我们将讨论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，我们的贡献并不局限于使用新数据，我们还打算对现有文献做出一些概念和方法上的贡献。首先，我们将开发并实施一个计量经济学模型框架，该框架将克服内部一致性问题，而内部一致性是评估边界重要性的最广泛使用的方法，即Engel和Rogers（1996）开发的方法（在下文中以ER表示）所遭受的问题。此外，我们选择的方法将使我们能够研究欧洲本地零售市场内部和跨境竞争的本质。更具体地说，使用非常灵活的空间计量经济模型和贝叶斯模型选择技术，我们将分析零售市场的竞争在多大程度上可以被描述为本地或全球的，以及边界在多大程度上阻碍了市场之间的竞争。在我们的第二次主要扩展中，我们打算对边界造成的经济损失提供改进的措施。目前最流行的评估边界重要性的措施（这可以追溯到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），而且在严格意义上也不代表经济福利措施。采用来自产业组织和市场营销领域的新发展的计量经济学技术来实现我们的研究目的，使我们能够从估计的消费者偏好参数中构建明确的边界经济成本度量。

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.