I am delighted to announce that I will participate online at the begining of September to a conference named New Data and Tools to Track and Analyse International Trade in a Changing World. The conference is scheduled to take place in online on September 8, 2026. It will be my first participation to an event organized by the OECD and the Banque de France.
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.
