Cost Pass-Through in the Swedish Coffee Market

Dick Durevall ()
Additional contact information
Dick Durevall: Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: P.O.Box 640, SE 40530 GÖTEBORG, Sweden, http://www.economics.gu.se

No 697, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: Cost pass-through to retail prices shows how changes in marginal costs are allocated between producers and consumers, and it is therefore closely related to market structure and competition. This paper uses Swedish data on coffee products at the barcode level to evaluate pass-through from the cost of green coffee beans, the main marginal cost, to the retail price of roasted and ground coffee. First long-run cost pass-through is estimated for each product, and then regression is used to analyse how pass-through varies across market shares, retailer-owned brands and other product characteristics. A general result is that pass-through is roughly complete for products with large market shares, while those with small market shares have low pass-through rates. There is no evidence that retailer-owned brands have higher pass-through than brand-name products with similar market shares, which would be the case if retailer-owned brands avoided double marginalization through vertical integration. Thus, although there is not perfect competition in the Swedish coffee market, a large part of it appears to be highly competitive.

Keywords: Coffee market; Market power; Pass-through; Market shares (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 L13 L89 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-eur, nep-ind and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/51976 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0697

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson ().