Spinning the Web: The Impact of ICT on Trade in Intermediates and Technology Diffusion

Abstract

Wan provided excellent research assistance. The title of the paper is borrowed from www.spinningtheweb.org.uk. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Firm Productivity and Innovation

“…There is also evidence of positive effects on R&D (Goldberg et al, 2010;Bøler et al, 2015), patenting (Bloom et al, 2016b), product innovation (Goldberg et al, 2010;Bas & Paunov, 2018), and technology adoption (Bas & Berthou, 2017;Juhász & Steinwender, 2018;Bloom et al, 2016b). 10 Most of the studies focus on firms in developing countries.…”

The effect of broadband on European Union trade: A regional spatial approach

“…Through information and knowledge flows, ICTs contribute to the organisation of global value chains due to the offshoring of manufacturing and other enterprise functions (Grossman & Rossi-Hansberg, 2008). As a consequence, ICTs increase the international fragmentation of production with a higher number of countries engaging in global value chains and hence in international trade (Antràs & Chor, 2013;Juhász & Steinwender, 2018;Overman, Redding, & Venables, 2003).…”

Urban economics in a historical perspective: Recovering data with machine learning

“…Using data from newspapers, she finds a convergence of prices across the Atlantic ocean after the introduction of the transatlantic telegraph, coupled with larger and more volatile trade flows. Juhász and Steinwender (2018) extract shipping information from a daily, London-based publication, to investigate the drivers of trade in the nineteenth century cotton textile industry. Their study illustrates the potential of an automated approach to the digitisation of historical newspapers: they use optical character recognition to convert the scanned images of publications into text files, which are then processed through a text matching procedure to extract the relevant information.…”

“…A recent, flourishing literature exploits historical data in order to understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying the spatial distribution of economic activity across countries, across regions or cities within countries, or across neighbourhoods within cities. Historical patterns of spatial development may indeed shed light on: the role of agricultural productivity on urban development (Matsuyama, 1992;Nunn and Qian, 2011); the long-term drivers of urban structure within and between cities (Ahlfeldt et al, 2015;Siodla, 2015;Redding and Sturm, 2016;Heblich et al, 2021b;Hornbeck and Keniston, 2017), and the specific role of transportation (Baum-Snow, 2007;Duranton and Turner, 2012;Brooks and Lutz, 2019;Heblich et al, 2021a); the effect of transportation on the spatial distribution of economic activity (Atack, 2013;Donaldson and Hornbeck, 2016;Donaldson, 2018;Campante and Yanagizawa-Drott, 2018;Pascali, 2017;Trew, 2020) and the role of distance and communication in sustaining economic exchanges (Bossuyt et al, 2001;Bakker et al, 2021;Juhász and Steinwender, 2018;Steinwender, 2018;Barjamovic et al, 2019); migration and how it shapes intergenerational mobility (Olivetti and Paserman, 2015;Abramitzky et al, 2012Abramitzky et al, , 2021bAger et al, 2019).…”