Law of One Price

We discuss the nonparametric approach to profit efficiency analysis at the firm and industry levels in the absence of complete price information. Two new insights are developed. First, we measure profit inefficiency in monetary terms using absolute shadow prices. Second, we evaluate all firms using the same input–output prices. This allows us to aggregate firm-level profit inefficiencies to the overall industry inefficiency. Besides the measurement of profit losses, the presented approach enables one to recover absolute price information from ...

This paper examines empirically the dynamic process of regional market integration in twelve Asian economies using a new modeling approach combining DF with ECM. This approach enables us to obtain latent regional dynamic factors which correspond well with the 'foreign' parity ...

We examine the role of nominal price rigidities in explaining the deviations from the Law of One Price (LOP) across cities in Japan. Focusing on intra-national relative prices isolates the border effect and thus enables us to extract the pure effect of sticky prices. A two-city model with nominal rigidities and transportation costs predicts that the variation of LOP deviations

The natural gas market all over the world has been suffering tremendous changes for the past decades, not only because of market liberalization, but also due to industry restructuring and the strong expansion of liquefied natural gas market (LNG) which brought the missing ...

El presente artículo es la continuación del artículo “Generalidades de los ADRs: Un estudio de caso sectorial para empresas de Colombia, México, Brasil y Chile” y al igual que este, es un subproducto de la investigación “Arbitraje con ADRs: Un estudio de caso sectorial para empresas de Colombia, México, Brasil y Chile”. El artículo se divide en dos partes, en

With its increasing integration into the world economy, agricultural exports and rural incomes in Vietnam have increased substantially in recent years. At the sub-national level, however, there are concerns that not all regions and categories of agricultural producers have and will benefit from the ongoing liberalization of agricultural markets. Vietnam's elongated geography and lack of spatial market integration pose special problems in this regard. Accordingly, this study aims to answer three interrelated questions: (a) whether there is spatial integration between paddy markets in the North and South of Vietnam; (b) whether there is spatial integration in paddy markets within the North and within the South; and, (c) if within-region integration is stronger and faster than between-region integration. The empirical model we develop to answer these questions, uses estimates of transfer costs to generalize the well known model of spatial market integration due to Ravallion to allo...

This article argues that the appropriate standard for the analysis of commodity market integration is the transport cost adjusted law of one price. A threshold error correction model that incorporates that property is developed and applied to French wheat prices in the ...

This paper examines 4 million price observations over an eight month time period for 1000 of the best-selling consumer electronics products found on the price comparison site Shopper.com. We find that observed levels of price dispersion vary systematically with the number of firms listing price quotes for a given product. For example, for products where only two firms list prices, the gap between their prices averages 22 percent. In contrast, for products where 17 firms list prices (the average in our sample), the gap is only about 3.5 percent. Further, we find little support for the notion that prices on the Internet are converging to the “law of one price. ” The average range in prices was about 40 percent, and the average gap between the two lowest prices listed for a given product remained stable at around 5 percent. We show that the combination of stable and ubiquitous price dispersion, coupled with dispersion that differs in the small and in the large, is consistent with a num...

This paper examines 4 million price observations over an eight month time period for 1000 of the best-selling consumer electronics products found on the price comparison site Shopper.com. We find that observed levels of price dispersion vary systematically with the number of firms listing price quotes for a given product. For example, for products where only two firms list prices, the gap between their prices averages 22 percent. In contrast, for products where 17 firms list prices (the average in our sample), the gap is only about 3.5 percent. Further, we find little support for the notion that prices on the Internet are converging to the “law of one price. ” The average range in prices was about 40 percent, and the average gap between the two lowest prices listed for a given product remained stable at around 5 percent. We show that the combination of stable and ubiquitous price dispersion, coupled with dispersion that differs in the small and in the large, is consistent with a num...

This paper examines exchange-rate and price-level data for the long period 1590-2009 for the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (earlier the Dutch Republic and England), countries that at various times over this near four century span have differed substantially in terms of the pace at which their economies were developing, have operated under a variety of exchange rate regimes, and have been subjected to an extremely wide variety of real shocks. The principal conclusion of this study is the resiliency of the simple purchasing-power-parity model and of the law of one price at the microeconomic level. Both take some heavy blows during this close to four-century long sample period. In the end, however, they emerge surprisingly unscathed. Real factors at times appear to have had substantial effects on real exchange rates and hence PPP, but such effects ultimately dissipate. As a long-run equilibrium condition, PPP holds up remarkably well.

The standard approach to modelling coffee prices ignores the impact that changes in government policies and market structures has on coffee prices. These changes have led to large structural breaks in coffee prices implying the standard estimates are ...

This paper examines whether there is spatial integration between and within paddy markets in the north and south of Vietnam. The empirical model developed uses estimates of transfer costs to generalise Ravallion's model of spatial market integration to allow for threshold ...

The purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOP) are among the most relevant issues in the academic debate: restricting the search to Google Scholar, the exact sequence of words “purchasing power parity” scored 57,600 hits1. The reason of such popularity lies in the fact that the basic relationship underlying these concepts is one of the founding elements of international economics. Nevertheless, when undergone to empirical scrutiny the PPP quickly became one of the major puzzles in international finance. Initially ...

At a level of individual goods, heterogeneity of marginal transaction costs, proxied by price-to-weight ratios and stowage factors, explains a large part of the variation in thresholds of no-adjustment and conditional half-lives of law of one price deviations. Prices of heavier (more voluminous) goods deviate further before becoming mean-reverting. Moreover, after becoming mean-reverting, prices of heavier goods converge more slowly. Together with measures of pricing power, market size, distance, and exchange rate volatility, these factors explain up to 43% of variation in no-adjustment threshold estimates across 52 goods in US–Canada post-Bretton Woods monthly CPI data and are robust in a broader five-country dataset. They open two avenues for the importance of marginal transaction costs in accounting for real exchange rate persistence: through (a) generating persistence in individual real exchange rate components, and (b) accentuating it by the aggregation of heterogeneous components (“aggregation bias” of Imbs et al., 2005a).