TY  - JOUR
AU  - Crucini,Mario J.
AU  - Shintani,Mototsugu
AU  - Tsuruga,Takayuki
TI  - The Law of One Price Without the Border: The Role of Distance Versus Sticky Prices
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14835
PY  - 2009
Y2  - April 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14835
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14835.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Mario J. Crucini
Department of Economics
Vanderbilt University
Box 1819 Station B
Nashville, TN 37235-1819
Tel: 615/322-7357
Fax: 615/343-8459
E-Mail: mario.j.crucini@vanderbilt.edu

Mototsugu Shintani
Department of Economics
Vanderbilt University
Box 1819 Station B
Nashville, TN 37235-1819
E-Mail: mototsugu.shintani@vanderbilt.edu

Takayuki Tsuruga
Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University
Yoshida Honmachi Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501
JAPAN
E-Mail: tsuruga@econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp
AB  - 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 is lower for goods with less frequent price adjustment after controlling for the distance separating the cities. Using retail price data for individual goods and services collected in Japanese cities, we find strong evidence supporting this prediction. Adapting the Engel and Rogers (1996) regression framework to our theoretical setting, we quantify the separate roles of nominal rigidities and trade costs (proxied by distance) in generating LOP variability. Our estimates suggest that the distance equivalent of nominal rigidities can be as large as the `width' of the border typically found in the literature on international LOP deviations. The findings point to both the utility of the regression framework in identifying qualitative effects (i.e., sign of a coefficient) and the challenges interpreting their quantitative implications.
ER  -