We propose a decomposition of the border effect in international trade by controlling for differences in competition in local markets. An extension of the Hotelling (1929) model shows that the availability of local substitutes increases price dispersion and biases the estimation of the border...

The “border effect” literature ?nds that political boundaries have a large impact on relative prices, implicitly adding several thousands of miles to trade. In this paper we show that the standard empirical speci?cation suffers from selection bias, and propose a new methodology based on...

We propose a decomposition of the border effect in international trade by controlling for differences in competition in local markets. An extension of the Hotelling (1929) model shows that the availability of local substitutes increases price dispersion and biases the estimation of the border...