IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/kuiedp/0202.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

'Mind the Gap!': Transport Costs and Price Convergence in the 19th Century Atlantic Economy

Author

Listed:
  • Karl Gunnar Persson

    (Institute of Economics, University of Copenhagen)

Abstract

This paper challenges the widely held view that sharply falling real transport costs closed the transatlantic gap in grain prices in the second half of the 19th century. Several new results emerge from an analysis of a new data set of weekly wheat prices and freight costs from New York to UK markets. Firstly, there was a decline in the transatlantic price gap but it was not sharp and the gap remained substantial. Secondly, the fall in the transatlantic price differential had more to do with improved market and marketing efficiency than with falling transport costs. Thirdly, spurious price convergence (or divergence) can appear if quality differences associated with allegedly homogeneous commodities like wheat are not controlled for.

Suggested Citation

  • Karl Gunnar Persson, 2002. "'Mind the Gap!': Transport Costs and Price Convergence in the 19th Century Atlantic Economy," Discussion Papers 02-02, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:kud:kuiedp:0202
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.ku.dk/english/research/publications/wp/2002/0202.pdf/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. James M. Nason & Donald G. Paterson & Ronald A. Shearer, 2003. "Bulk commodities and the Liverpool and London markets of the mid-19th century," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2003-29, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    market integration; spatial price gaps;

    JEL classification:

    • N7 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kud:kuiedp:0202. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Hoffmann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/okokudk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.