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（欧盟）成员国经济异质性和差异的兴趣，特别是在加入欧洲货币联盟（EMU）的国家中。虽然有各种研究使用当今标准使用的高质量微观价格数据来检查美国的一体化程度（美国）和加拿大，采用欧洲可比价格数据的研究要么局限于极少数商品（见，例如，Fischer（2012）），很少有位置（参见，例如，Engel和Rogers（2004））或主要是描述性的（参见，例如，欧盟委员会（2011）或Kurkowiak（2012））。在获得高质量的多国欧洲微观价格数据集后，我们打算填补这一空白，并获得对欧洲商品市场运作的宝贵新见解。我们将在这方面解决的问题包括评估欧盟国家在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，但我们也打算对现有文献作出一些概念和方法上的贡献。首先，我们将制定和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，从这个框架中，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（以下用ER表示）受到影响。此外，我们选择的方法将使我们能够研究欧洲当地零售市场之间的竞争性质，包括国内和跨国竞争。具体而言，我们将使用非常灵活的空间计量经济学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地方性的或全球性的，以及边界在多大程度上成为市场之间竞争的障碍。在我们的第二个主要扩展中，我们打算提供改进的衡量边界引起的经济损失的方法。目前最流行的衡量边界重要性的方法（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。采用新发展的计量经济学技术，从产业组织和市场营销领域，我们的研究的目的，使我们能够构建明确的经济成本措施的边界，这是来自估计的消费者偏好参数。

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.