Title: International Trade in the Digital Era

Speaker: Wei Shangjin, Tenured Chair Professor, Columbia University, USA; Director of the China Economic Research Group, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), USA; Research Fellow, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Europe; Consultant, Hong Kong Monetary Authority; Research Fellow, Brookings Institution, USA; Visiting Professor, Institute of International Finance, Fudan University. He has served as Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank, Head of the Trade and Investment Division of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Consultant of the World Bank, and has taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. His main research fields include international finance, international trade, government governance and reform, Chinese economy, and macroeconomics. His academic papers have been published in top international journals such as "American Economic Review", "Journal of Political Economy" and "Quarterly Journal of Economics".

Abstract: How does the digital era alter familiar features of international trade? We explore such questions using exports of US movies which have gone from physical films to digital files. Unsurprisingly, digitization reduces the gravity effect: A one-standard-deviation increase in digitization reduces the distance elasticity from -0.46 to -0.40. More interestingly, digitization weakens the Washington Apples effect: The average gap in the distance elasticities between top and bottom quality movies (those at the 10th and 90th percentiles of IMDb ratings) is 0.240; a one-standard-deviation increase in digitization reduces this gap by 0.11. Our results are robust to alternative measures of digitization and quality. This implies that producers of lower quality varieties benefit disproportionately from digitization.

Date & time: 15 July 2025, 15:00

Venue: B321, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University