Cross-Border Shopping: Evidence from Household Transaction Records

Cross-border shopping allows purchasing comparable goods at lower prices abroad. At the same time, it can reduce domestic consumption, sales, or tax collection. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries restricted cross-border movements to mitigate the virus’s spread, thereby also prohibiting cross-border shopping. I exploit the random timing of the Swiss border closure using data on 600 million customer-linked transactions from the largest Swiss retailer to identify patterns in cross-border shopping. I find that grocery expenditures temporarily increased by 10-15% in border regions. Households drive up to 70 minutes to a location across the border, but the distance decay function is non-linear and marginal costs of traveling become negligible after 40 minutes

Spatial frictions in consumption and retail competition

In this paper, we empirically quantify spatial consumption frictions and the degree of local retail competition. We exploit a unique data set including 1.5 billion daily transactions in combination with detailed characteristics of more than 3 million households. Our estimates are based on a quasi-experimental approach to estimate the causal effect of store openings. We find that a same-chain store opening in the proximity of households' residences reduces their expenditures at incumbent stores by 30% in the first month. Smaller effects for competitors suggest imperfect substitutability between retail chains. Exploiting more than 350 openings, we identify causal consumption gravity functions, which allow us to quantify spatial consumption areas. We document significant heterogeneities across regions and socio-demographic groups, indicating substantial inequalities in consumption access

The Global Risk Analysis for the 2009 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction

In May 2009, the UNISDR system published the 2009 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR 2009). One component of this report consisted in a global risk analysis. This task was performed by several institutions which join their efforts during two years to achieve a global modelling of hazards. This includes new hazard models for floods, tropical cyclones, landslides, drought and tsunamis as well as re-interpretation of earthquakes hazard. It allowed for the computation of human and economical exposure. A totally new methodology was used to calibrate vulnerability by using a so- called "event per event" analysis. This allowed determining what are the socio-economical and contextual parameters that are associated with human and economical vulnerability. This new methodology allows considering the intensity of each event as well as contextual parameters in order to compute the risk for different natural hazards. Risk maps were produced for four natural hazards (i.e. floods, earthquakes, landslides and tropical cyclones). This was provided at a resolution of 1 x 1 km. This also allow for the computation of an index for comparing the risk level of different countries. Trend in risk were also studied