Exporting Spatial Externalities

Using spatial econometrics, we estimate the effect of externalities generated by neighbors’ exports on place-level exports, explicitly modeling the distance to those neighbors. We find there is a positive effect of neighbors’ exports on exports to the same country but less so for exporting generally. We also find that using a spatial-weights term based on the physical distance between exporters greatly outperforms a dichotomous measure based on exporters in the same region. The results are robust to alternative definitions of the spatial weight.