TDPE presents Asha Sundaram

Asha Sundaram, Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at The School of Economics, University of Cape Town in South Africa

Buyer-Seller Relationships in International Trade:  Do Your Neighbors Matter?

The authors investigate if the presence of exporters, in the neighborhood of a firm, that previously transacted with a particular foreign buyer facilitates a match between the firm and this buyer. Using confidential U.S. customs data on trade transactions between U.S. importers and Bangladeshi exporters between 2002 and 2009, and information on the geographic location of Bangladeshi exporters, the authors show that the presence of neighboring exporters that previously transacted with a U.S. importer increases the likelihood of matching with the same U.S. importer for the first time. This suggests a role for business networks among trading firms, and for potential knowledge and information gains realized through them. Their research design allows the authors to isolate export spillovers that are partner-specific, from overall export spillovers previously documented in the literature. Thus, they further extend our understanding of network effects and spillovers at the micro level where international trade occurs.

Asha Sundaram is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at The School of Economics, University of Cape Town in South Africa.  She is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She has a PhD in Economics from Syracuse University.  Her research interests are in the fields of International Trade and Development Economics.  Topics she works on include trade liberalization effects and their interaction with domestic institutions, trade and firm behavior, and micro enterprises and the informal sector.

Sponsored by the Trade Development and Political Economy at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs