Replication package for "High-Level Visits and the Extensive Margin of Exports: Evidence From South Korea"

Replication package for the article "High-Level Visits and the Extensive Margin of Exports: Evidence From South Korea." The article estimates the effect of South Korea's outbound high-level diplomatic visits on the extensive margin of its exports — the count of active six-digit product lines a partner buys. Treatment is a clean-timed outbound visit, dated against fixed multilateral events; estimation is de Chaisemartin–D'Haultfœuille staggered difference-in-differences on a partner-year panel of 229 partners over 1996–2024, with a 999-draw partner-cluster bootstrap. Six candidate channels are tested and none accounts for the effect. WHAT IS HERE 82 files and one directory: the partner-year analysis panel and the script that rebuilds it from the raw trade data; the visit census and the multilateral-event anchor tables; the Rauch and BEC concordances; the estimation scripts for the headline, the channel battery, the diagnostics and the bootstrap; one result file per estimation round; the 999 bootstrap draws; and the execution logs. Three documents orient the package. README.md is the fifteen-minute orientation. REPLICATION.md is the linear guide to running the chain, and carries the paper-order crosswalk (every figure, table and inline value to the artifact it came from) and the Documented Boundaries (eight things that are absent or partial, each named). CODEBOOK.md defines the variables. WHAT IS NOT HERE The raw trade data. BACI HS92 V202601 (CEPII) is about 2.4 GB compressed and is obtained from CEPII directly; the package contains the script that rebuilds the analysis panel from it, and the panel itself, so only one of the six stages needs the raw archive. LICENSING The record carries CC BY 4.0, but the package holds three kinds of material and they are not all the author's to license. Code is MIT. Author-generated data are CC BY 4.0. Files carrying BACI values are not relicensed: they remain under the Etalab Open Licence 2.0 with attribution to CEPII. README.md section 2 states which group each file belongs to, and the file manifest records it per file. Third-party sources: BACI (CEPII, Etalab Open Licence 2.0); the Country and Organization Leader Travel dataset (Moyer et al. 2025, Harvard Dataverse V3, doi:10.7910/DVN/HJK7DN, CC0 1.0); World Bank WDI tariff data (CC BY 4.0); the Rauch classification via the CRAN package concordance v2.0.0. REPRODUCTION Reproduction is defined at the level of the reported numbers, not of the compiled PDF: pdfTeX writes a timestamp, so two compilations of the same source differ. Four internal identities can be checked without re-running anything expensive; REPLICATION.md section 10 lists them. The documentation in this package was drafted with an AI assistant and revised by the author, as the article's acknowledgments record. The estimates and the artifacts they are read from were not.