Crossing national borders adds significantly to price dispersion. This study of prices in Japan and the United States finds that a substantial part of that border effect is attributable to distance, shipping costs, exchange rates, and relative variability in wages. Parsley and Wei exploit...

Using a panel of 51 prices from 48 cities in the United States we provide an upper bound estimate of the rate of convergence to Purchasing Power Parity. We find convergence rates substantially higher than typically found in cross-country data. We investigate some potentially serious biases...

This paper casts doubt on the validity of the hysteresis hypothesis as an explanation of the persistent U.S. trade deficits in the 1980s. We propose two tests to investigate two different implications of the hypothesis. The first implication is that cumulative changes in exchange rates, in...

The authors exploit three-dimensional panel data on prices for twenty seven traded goods, over eighty eight quarters, across ninety six cities in Japan, and the United States, to answer several questions: 1) Does the average exchange rate between countries stray further from zero, than that...

A rapidly expanding literature studies the effect of currency union and other exchange rate arrangements on goods market integration. All existing studies employ a methodology based on observed volumes of trade. However, from a theoretical point of view the connection between market integration...

This paper studies the effect of instrumental and institutional stabilization of exchange rate volatility on the integration of goods markets. Rather than using data on volume of trade, this paper employs a 3-dimensional panel of prices of 95 very disaggregated goods (e.g., light bulbs) in 83...