Border effects in passenger air traffic

The empirical literature on border effects suggests that national borders substantially reduce the level of economic transactions. This paper adds another piece of evidence to the significance of border effects by applying a new data set which is completely independent of the data sets of previous studies. Our data refer to domestic and international passenger departures from German airports. The econometric results indicate that the German border reduces passenger air traffic by a factor of four to five. This magnitude is in line with the results of previous studies for trade and investment flows.