TEXT-AS-DATA ANALYSIS OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE

With multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in deadlock, rule-making on international economic governance has shifted to preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This seminar builds on a recently digitized and annotated corpus of 450 PTA full texts in English, French, and Spanish. I will show (a) how one can harness text-as-data techniques (pdf) to predict merchandise trade flows in a reduced-form gravity model, (b) the value added of enriching workhorse economic models with information coming from textual sources. The event seeks to introduce students to new frontiers of research at the intersection of international economic law and trade. Working language is English.