Mai-Hao / tota_course_euspb

Text-as-data analysis of international trade

Dmitriy Skougarevskiy, European University at St. Petersburg

Overview

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 short 5-week course seeks to introduce the audience to recent trends in international economic order in quantitative fashion. We will discuss the workhorse model of empirical international trade in goods and extend it with the aid of the textual information on trade law covering those flows.

In doing so we will learn how to gather information on merchandise trade, predict trade flows, and represent texts as vectors. Practical sessions will take the theory to statistical packages; the course is hands-on, with each lecture followed by a code review session.

Course Requirements

Readings The course consists of lectures and lab sessions. Each lecture and lab session is accompanied by required readings. I expect the participants to have read the required materials by the beginning of each lecture or session.

Code During lab sessions we will review and execute pre-written code together. Code snippets will be disseminated before each session in code/ folder in this repository. Participants are required to have the code ready on their laptops before each lab session.

Technical requirements Each lab session will be conducted hands-on, with your laptops. I expect you to come to the first lab session with base R (https://www.r-project.org) preinstalled.

Evaluation Since this is a zero-credit course, there will be no evaluation.

Working language English.

Course Schedule

Lecture 1 | Preferential Trade Agreements and International Economic Order (slides)

• Chauffour, J.-P. and J.-C. Maur (eds). 2011. Preferential Trade Agreement Policies for Development: A Handbook. Chapter 2 (required). Chapter 6 (optional). http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2329
• Alschner, W. and J. Seiermann and D. Skougarevskiy. 2017. Text-as-data analysis of preferential trade agreements: Mapping the PTA landscape. http://unctad.org/en/pages/PublicationWebflyer.aspx?publicationid=1838 (required)

Lab Session 1 | Working with XMLs in R (code)

• ToTA: Texts of Trade Agreements repository. https://github.com/mappingtreaties/tota/ (required)
• xml2 tutorial. https://blog.rstudio.com/2015/04/21/xml2/ (required)
• XPath cheatsheet. https://data-lessons.github.io/library-webscraping/extras/xpath-cheatsheet.md.pdf (optional)

Lecture 2 | Gravity and Gravitas (slides)

• Shepherd, B. 2016. The Gravity Model of International Trade: A User Guide. UNESCAP. http://www.unescap.org/sites/default/files/GravityUserGuide-REVISED-02.pdf (required)
• Baldwin R. and D. Taglioni. 2006. Gravity for Dummies and Dummies for Gravity Equations. NBER Working Paper No. 12516. http://www.nber.org/papers/w12516 (optional)

Lab Session 2 | Working with COMTRADE (code)

• What is UN Comtrade? https://unstats.un.org/unsd/tradekb/Knowledgebase/50075/What-is-UN-Comtrade (required)
• Using the UN Comtrade data API with R. https://comtrade.un.org/data/Doc/api/ex/r (required)
• United Nations. International Trade Statistics Yearbook. 2016. Volume I. https://comtrade.un.org/ITSY2016VolI.pdf (skim through pp. viiix)

Lecture 3 | Text factorisation I: Bag-of-words methods (slides)

• Gentzkow, M. and B. Kelly and M. Taddy. 2017. Text as data. NBER Working Paper No. 23276 http://www.nber.org/papers/w23276 (required, pp. 111)
• Jurafsky, D. and J. Martin. 2016... Speech and Language Processing. Chapter 15.1. (required). Chapter 4.1 (optional) https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/15.pdf, https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/4.pdf

Lab session 3 | Reducing PTA document-term matrices to latent spaces (code)

• Selivanov, D. Vectorization http://text2vec.org/vectorization.html (required)

Lecture 4 | Text factorisation II: Distributional semantics (slides)

• Jurafsky, D. and J. Martin. 2016... Speech and Language Processing. Chapter 15.4. (required). Chapter 16.2. (optional) https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/15.pdf, https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/16.pdf

Lab session 4 | Learning the meaning of legal terms in PTAs with embeddings (code)

• Selivanov, D. GloVe Word Embeddings http://text2vec.org/glove.html (required)
• StarSpace. https://github.com/facebookresearch/starSpace (required)
• Wu, L. et al. 2018. StarSpace: Embed All The Things! https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.03856 (optional)

Lecture 5 | Welfare effects of Preferential Trade Agreements (slides)

• Chauffour, J.-P. and J.-C. Maur (eds). 2011. Preferential Trade Agreement Policies for Development: A Handbook. Chapter 3 (required). http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2329
• Baier, S. and J. Bergstrand. 2007. Do free trade agreements actually increase members’ international trade? Journal of International Economics. 71, 7295. (required) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2006.02.005

Lab Session 5 | Putting the pieces together: PTA embeddings and merchandise trade (code)

• This session will capitalise on all the previous readings

License

This course is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.