Cross-border competition in the gasoline retail market: Impact of proximity at the German-Polish border

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS Energy Economics Pub Date : 2024-10-15 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2024.107961

Mats Petter Kahl

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Abstract

In this article, I analyze how persistently lower gasoline prices in Poland affect the prices set in the German border region. Based on a complete dataset of German gasoline prices and an assessment of driving distances between gasoline stations, I estimate the impact of one additional kilometer of distance to the nearest Polish competitor on the price charged by German gasoline stations. Following the fixed effects filtered estimator approach proposed by Pesaran and Zhou (2018) and controlling for various station characteristics, I find no evidence that German gasoline stations enter price competition with their Polish counterparts. My descriptive analysis of gasoline station infrastructure in the German border region reveals increasingly sparse gasoline station density when approaching the Polish border, along with an increasing share of premium brands. These results may reflect the effect of substantially lower taxes in Poland, discouraging German gasoline stations from locating near the border and effectively ruling out cross-border price competition. Although indirect, my findings suggest the presence of fuel tourism.

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汽油零售市场的跨境竞争：德国-波兰边境邻近地区的影响

在本文中，我分析了波兰持续走低的汽油价格如何影响德国边境地区的汽油价格。基于德国汽油价格的完整数据集和对加油站之间行车距离的评估，我估算了距离最近的波兰竞争者多一公里对德国加油站收费价格的影响。按照 Pesaran 和 Zhou（2018 年）提出的固定效应滤波估计方法，并控制各种加油站特征，我发现没有证据表明德国加油站与波兰同行展开了价格竞争。我对德国边境地区加油站基础设施的描述性分析表明，当接近波兰边境时，加油站密度越来越稀疏，同时高端品牌所占份额越来越大。这些结果可能反映了波兰大幅降低税收的影响，阻碍了德国加油站在边境附近设点，并有效地排除了跨境价格竞争。尽管是间接的，但我的研究结果表明燃料旅游的存在。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.