Spatial Competition with Changing Market Institutions

• Environmental and Resource Economics Workshop

Date and Location

Thursday, September 30, 2010, 1:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Abstract

The nature of competition across space can be fundamentally altered by changes in market institutions. We propose a framework which allows for the inclusion of market-altering policy changes in the spatial analysis of competitive behavior. Our method also allows for the endogenous incorporation of breaks in explanatory variables for a spatial panel data sets. In general, the paper fills a gap in the literature between work that focuses on spatial price responsiveness of agents to one another and the literature that explores how policy changes in market regulations affect the competitive behavior of agents. As an application, we account for how a change in fisheries management (the creation of catch shares) affects the spatial responsiveness of fish processors across a 21-year time period.