International trade and social connectedness

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bailey, Michael; Gupta, Abhinav; Hillenbrand, Sebastian; Kuchler, Theresa; Richmond, Robert; Stroebel, Johannes
• 署名单位: Facebook Inc; New York University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2020.103418
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: International trade; Social connectedness; information frictions; Border effects

摘要

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for goods where information frictions may be large. The social connections that predict trade in specific products are those between the regions where the product is produced in the exporting country and the regions where it is used in the importing country. Once we control for social connectedness, the estimated effects of geographic distance and country borders on trade decline substantially. (c) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.