We exploit variation in gasoline and cigarettes taxes in adjacent political jurisdictions for northern Illinois and Indiana to examine consumers' trade-off between prices and travel. We develop a model that relates activity in the retail gasoline industry around the tax borders to consumer locations. Our results indicate that the willingness of a typical Chicagoland consumer to travel an additional mile to buy gasoline corresponds to about $0.065 to $0.084 per gallon. According to our estimates, the observed area of Chicago, the jurisdiction with the highest taxes, is missing approximately 40% of the capacity that would exist were taxes equalized.

Retail banking is a complex industry in which depository institutions bundle various services and may have market power. We use a recent regulation as a natural experiment to provide broad evidence about competition and the importance of bundling in retail banking. That regulation, which resulted from the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd–Frank Act, capped debit card interchange fees for banks with over 10 billion in assets. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we document and quantify the resulting decline in interchange income for treated banks. We further find that treated banks offset more than 90% of the lost interchange income through increases in deposit fees for account holders. We argue that the ability to adjust deposit fees indicates (i) that treated banks have market power with respect to their account holders and (ii) strong complementarity between debit card transactions and deposit accounts. These results are robust when limiting the sample to banks near the asset threshold or using control banks with low direct competition with treated banks. Treated banks neither reduced costs nor strategically avoided the 10 billion threshold.