News
New VoxEU column on "Russia’s e-commerce trade in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion"
Russia’s e-commerce trade in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion: Evidence from high-frequency dataAlexandra Avdeenko, Maximilian Kaiser, Krisztina Kis-Katos
Whether economic sanctions against Russia have real effects has been increasingly called into question. This column suggests that changes in e-commerce can demonstrate whether and how the 2022 Western sanctions contributed to de-linking Russia from the West. An analysis of trends in cross-border international online retail based on digitally recorded daily transactions data from 2,288 international and Russian companies shows substantial declines in Russia’s e-commerce transactions. About five weeks after the war started, revenues from e-commerce imports to Russia had fallen by half, with no signs of compensation by Russian retailers in the sample studied.
Full text: https://voxeu.org/article/russia-s-e-commerce-trade-aftermath-2022-invasion
Geo-coded Twitter data R Package
Twitmo is a new and easy to use R Package that can generates and processes geo-coded Twitter data. You can use it to generate innovative data for any topic that is discussed on Twitter. Twitmo was featured as a top 40 package on CRAN. If you are interested, please get in touch with us.Buchmueller, A., G. Kant, C. Weisser, B. Säfken, T. Kneib, and K. Kis-Katos (2021). Twitmo: Twitter Topic Modeling and Visualization for R (R package version 0.1.2).
Geo-coded Twitter data
Do you want to generate interesting data for your thesis or research? TTLocVis is a new and easy to use tool that generates and processes geo-coded Twitter data. You can use it to generate innovative data for any topic that is discussed on Twitter. To learn more visit our TTLocVis website. If you are interested, please get in touch with us.Kant, G., Weisser, C. and Säfken, B. (2020), TTLocVis: A Twitter Topic Location Visualization Package. Journal of Open Source Software, 5 (54), 2507, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02507.
We thank the Campus-Institut Data Science (CIDAS) for funding this project.
New VoxEU column on "China’s mask diplomacy"
China’s mask diplomacy: Political and business ties facilitate access to critical medical goods during the coronavirus pandemicAndreas Fuchs, Lennart Kaplan, Krisztina Kis-Katos, Sebastian S. Schmidt, Felix Turbanisch, Feicheng Wang
China assumed an important role during the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 as the main exporter of critical medical goods such as face masks and disinfectants. However, shipments of medical goods have been turned into propaganda campaigns by Chinese state media, raising the question if access to medical goods is granted upon political goodwill. This column uses official monthly trade data from Chinese Customs to investigate the emerging trade patterns, both for commercial exports and donations of medical goods. It shows that both existing trade linkages and political ties to Chinese provinces can help to attract Chinese medical goods.
Full text: https://voxeu.org/article/china-s-mask-diplomacy
New VoxEU column on "right-wing populism in the tropics"
Right-wing populism in the tropics: The rise of Jair BolsonaroLaura Barros, Manuel Santos Silva
Brazil plunged into economic crisis between 2014 and 2018, the year when far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro won the presidential election. This column, part of the Vox debate on populism, argues that Bolsonaro’s surprising victory is partially explained by the way the economic crisis interacted with prevailing gender norms. In regions where men experience larger employment losses, there is an increase in the share of votes for Bolsonaro. In contrast, in regions where women experience larger losses, his vote share is relatively lower. This may be explained by men feeling more compelled to vote for a figure that embodies masculine stereotypes as a way of compensating for a decline in economic and social status.
Full text: https://voxeu.org/article/right-wing-populism-tropics-rise-jair-bolsonaro