I am delighted to announce that I will be in Sejong City, Republic of Korea, next week to present a recent research paper at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP). This research webinar will take place during my short visit as part of its Global South Think Tank Partnership Program.
I will present the following research project: Joshua Aizenman, Rodolphe Desbordes, and Jamel Saadaoui, Bilateral Conflict Risk and Trade: Military Wars, Trade Wars, and Diplomatic Noise, NBER Working Paper 35077 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35077.
How damaging is a “trade war” relative to a “military war” or a “war of words”? Aggregate conflict indices cannot tell, treating missile strikes, joint military exercises, sanctions, and protests alike. Using large global event databases, we build a monthly calibrated directed bilateral indicator decomposing hostility into kinetic conflict, military posture, trade-context hostility, and baseline diplomacy. The panel documents a shift toward economic coercion. In a gravity model, only “military” and “trade” wars reduce international trade: the former is the sharper blow to any single relationship, the latter the larger aggregate loss, since it strikes the biggest trading partners. The directed structure reveals a retaliation channel. Geopolitical deterioration places $334 billion of bilateral trade at risk over the period 2015–2023, though much of it can plausibly be rerouted to alternative suppliers.
