All Roads Lead to Rome: Global Air Connectivity and Bilateral Trade

This replication package accompanies the paper "All Roads Lead to Rome: Global Air Connectivity and Bilateral Trade" by Zheng Wang, Feicheng Wang, and Zhuo Zhou. The study investigates how international air connectivity, by facilitating face-to-face interactions, impacts bilateral trade flows between countries. Utilizing a novel instrumental variable strategy based on exogenous variations in air connectivity through third-country transit hubs, this study analyzes itinerary-level global air passenger data from nearly all international scheduled flights between 2013 and 2018. The primary objective is to estimate the causal effect of improved air connectivity on trade, emphasizing differences across industries that require varying levels of relationship-specific investment and information exchange. The study demonstrates that enhanced air connectivity significantly boosts international trade, with particularly pronounced effects in industries that heavily rely on contract-intensive interactions and in the trade of new products. Additionally, the study examines how online communications may partially substitute in-person interactions, revealing nuanced complementarities and substitutive effects in facilitating international business transactions.

本复现数据集对应郑王、王非城及周卓所撰写的论文《条条大路通罗马：全球航空连通性与双边贸易》。本研究探讨国际航空连通性通过促进面对面交流，对国家间双边贸易流量的影响机制。本研究采用基于第三国中转枢纽航空连通性外生变动的全新工具变量策略（instrumental variable strategy），对2013至2018年间几乎所有国际定期航班的航线级全球航空客运数据进行分析。本研究的核心目标是评估航空连通性提升对贸易的因果效应，并重点关注不同行业的异质性——这些行业对关系专用性投资（relationship-specific investment）与信息交流的依赖程度存在显著差异。研究结果表明，航空连通性的提升能够显著促进国际贸易，其中在高度依赖契约密集型互动的行业以及新产品贸易领域，该促进效应尤为突出。此外，本研究还探讨了线上沟通可在多大程度上替代面对面交流，揭示了二者在促进国际商务交易过程中所存在的复杂互补与替代关系。