Nonlinear Aspects of Goods-Market Arbitrage and Adjustment: Heckscher's Commodity Points Revisited
48 Pages Posted: 20 Jul 2000 Last revised: 16 Jan 2022
Date Written: June 1997
Abstract
We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOOP) should explicitly take into account the possibility of commodity points' thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in the presence of transaction costs and uncertainty. More than eighty years ago, Heckscher stressed the importance of such incomplete arbitrage in the empirical application of PPP. We devise an econometric method to identify commodity points. Price adjustment is treated as a nonlinear process, and a threshold autoregression (TAR) offers a parsimonious specification within which both thresholds and adjustment speeds are estimated by maximum likelihood methods. Our model performs well using post-1980 data reasonable: adjustment outside the thresholds might imply half-lives of price deviations measured in months rather than years and the thresholds correspond to popular rough estimates as to the order of magnitude of actual transport costs. The estimated commodity points appear to be positively related to objective measures of market segmentation, notably nominal exchange rate volatility.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
By Charles M. Engel and John H. Rogers
-
Perspectives on PPP and Long-Run Real Exchange Rates
By Kenneth Froot and Kenneth Rogoff
-
A Panel Project on Purchasing Power Parity: Mean Reversion within and between Countries
-
Purchasing Power Parity in the Long Run
By Niso Abuaf and Philippe Jorion
-
Convergence to the Law of One Price Without Trade Barriers or Currency Fluctuations
By David C. Parsley and Shang-jin Wei
-
Explaining the Border Effect: The Role of Exchange Rate Variability, Shipping Costs, and Geography
By David C. Parsley and Shang-jin Wei