IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/28711.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Product Variety, the Cost of Living and Welfare Across Countries

Author

Listed:
  • Alberto Cavallo
  • Robert C. Feenstra
  • Robert Inklaar

Abstract

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compare the cost of living and welfare across countries, while incorporating product variety measured by the count of barcodes or firms. For 47 countries, we compare welfare relative to the United States to conventional measures of real consumption. Relative welfare is similar to or higher than that indicated by real consumption for a select group of nations in Europe and some large countries like China and Russia, but lower in most other countries. This qualitative pattern has some similarities to that found in Jones and Klenow (2016), but for very different reasons.

Suggested Citation

  • Alberto Cavallo & Robert C. Feenstra & Robert Inklaar, 2021. "Product Variety, the Cost of Living and Welfare Across Countries," NBER Working Papers 28711, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28711
    Note: ITI
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w28711.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alberto Cavallo, 2017. "Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-channel Retailers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(1), pages 283-303, January.
    2. Robert Inklaar & Marcel P. Timmer, 2014. "The Relative Price of Services," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 60(4), pages 727-746, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Cavallo, Alberto & Kryvtsov, Oleksiy, 2023. "What can stockouts tell us about inflation? Evidence from online micro data," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    2. Zheng, Han & Hongtao, Li, 2022. "Transportation Infrastructure and Trade," Discussion paper series HIAS-E-119, Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University.
    3. Han, Zheng & Li, Hongtao, 2022. "Transportation infrastructure and trade," Japan and the World Economy, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    4. Gouel, Christophe & Jean, Sébastien, 2023. "Love of variety and gains from trade," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 158(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Neslin, Scott A., 2022. "The omnichannel continuum: Integrating online and offline channels along the customer journey," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 98(1), pages 111-132.
    2. Peter Gal & Alexander Hijzen, 2016. "The short-term impact of product market reforms: A cross-country firm-level analysis," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1311, OECD Publishing.
    3. Alex Nikolsko‐Rzhevskyy & Oleksandr Talavera & Nam Vu, 2023. "The flood that caused a drought," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 61(4), pages 965-981, October.
    4. Lavopa, Alejandro & Szirmai, Adam, 2018. "Structural modernisation and development traps. An empirical approach," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 59-73.
    5. Drenik, Andrés & Perez, Diego J., 2020. "Price setting under uncertainty about inflation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 23-38.
    6. Shen, Yinhai & Zhang, Qing & Zhang, Zhichao & Ma, Xinyu, 2022. "Omnichannel retailing return operations with consumer disappointment aversion," Operations Research Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 9(C).
    7. Ilya B. Voskoboynikov, 2023. "Sources of productivity growth in Eastern Europe and Russia before the global financial crisis," Journal of Productivity Analysis, Springer, vol. 59(3), pages 225-241, June.
    8. Mingming Shi & Jun Zhou & Zhou Jiang, 2019. "Consumer heterogeneity and online vs. offline retail spatial competition," Frontiers of Business Research in China, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 1-19, December.
    9. Javier Cravino & Sam Haltenhof, 2020. "Real Exchange Rates, Income per Capita, and Sectoral Input Shares," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(1), pages 180-194, March.
    10. Daniel Schäfer, 2024. "Development and Sector Labor Income Shares," Economics working papers 2024-05, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    11. Yiquan Gu & Leonardo Madio & Carlo Reggiani, 2019. "Exclusive Data, Price Manipulation and Market Leadership," CESifo Working Paper Series 7853, CESifo.
    12. Xavier Jaravel & Martin O'Connell, 2020. "High‐Frequency Changes in Shopping Behaviours, Promotions and the Measurement of Inflation: Evidence from the Great Lockdown," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 41(3), pages 733-755, September.
    13. Brian Fabo & Sharon Sarah Belli, 2017. "(Un)beliveable wages? An analysis of minimum wage policies in Europe from a living wage perspective," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 6(1), pages 1-11, December.
    14. David Staines, 2023. "Stochastic Equilibrium the Lucas Critique and Keynesian Economics," Papers 2312.16214, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2024.
    15. Bhaskar, V. & Linacre, Robin & Machin, Stephen, 2019. "The economic functioning of online drugs markets," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 426-441.
    16. Christoph Basten & Steven Ongena, 2019. "The Geography of Mortgage Lending in Times of FinTech," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 19-39, Swiss Finance Institute.
    17. Bourreau, Marc & Manenti, Fabio M., 2023. "Selling cross-border in online markets: The impact of the ban on geoblocking strategies," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    18. Pena, Werner & Siegel, Christian, 2023. "Routine-biased technical change, structure of employment, and cross-country income differences," CEPR Discussion Papers 18366, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    19. Margarida Duarte & Diego Restuccia, 2020. "Relative Prices and Sectoral Productivity," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 18(3), pages 1400-1443.
    20. Duch-Brown, Néstor & Grzybowski, Lukasz & Romahn, André & Verboven, Frank, 2021. "Are online markets more integrated than traditional markets? Evidence from consumer electronics," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E01 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental Accounts
    • F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:28711. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.