Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics--Trade and Travel: Insights to be Gained from the Survey of International Air Travelers

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The researchers propose to use a unique data set, the Survey of International Air Travelers (SIAT),that will make possible the doctoral dissertation of the co-PI on the subject of the interaction ofinternational trade with international travel. The SIAT covers all overseas air travel from theU. S., by destination country, purpose of trip, and characteristics of the travelers includingcountry of residence. These data are available quarterly for the period 1993 to the present.Intellectual merit. In her dissertation the co-PI will use the SIAT to investigate at leastthree topics. First, the direction of causality between trade and travel will be examined. Usingappropriate panel estimation techniques, it will be determined whether bilateral business travelhelps to forecast bilateral trade and vice-versa. Second, the dissertation will explore themechanisms that underlie the increasingly well-established positive relationship betweenimmigration and bilateral trade. The interactions between immigrant stocks and bilateralbusiness and leisure travel by immigrants will be estimated for both U.S. exports and U.S.imports. The hypothesis will be tested that the interaction with leisure travel will be strongerrelative to the interaction with business travel for bilateral imports than for bilateral exports.This would confirm the conjecture in the literature that the stronger impact of immigrants onimports than exports reflects the effect of immigrant taste for goods from their countries of originover and above their promotion of trade through business contacts and provision of marketinformation. Third, the co-PI will use the SIAT to extend recent results showing that businessand social networks have a stronger positive impact on bilateral trade in differentiated thanhomogeneous products. It has been conjectured that these results reflect the more informationintensivenature of differentiated products. If this is true than differentiated products shouldrequire both greater sales effort and more after-sales service, and we expect to find strongercausal relationships running from bilateral business travel to bilateral trade and vice-versa fordifferentiated than for homogeneous products.Because the SIAT is an unknown data set and we were concerned about its quality, the PI'sobtained a small seed grant and purchased data for the first quarter of 2000 for the purpose ofpreliminary testing. The PI's added bilateral business travel to a standard cross-sectional gravitymodel of bilateral U.S. trade. If bilateral business travel had no explanatory power it wouldaugur poorly for the usefulness of the full SIAT data set. In fact, the PI's found that bilateral businesstravel has a strong positive association with both U.S. bilateral exports and bilateral imports,especially the former. These preliminary results are a positive indicator for the quality of theSIAT data and suggest there is much insight to be gained from use of the complete data set.Broader impacts. The qualitative nature and quantitative importance of informal barriersto international trade remains an important question in international economics. The study willhelp to gain a better understanding of how informal barriers to trade work and how large theyare. By quantifying the extent to which international business travel causes international trade,the study could also help to evaluate the many government programs worldwide that promotebusiness travel for the purpose of creating trade, including trade missions sponsored by the U.S.Department of Commerce.