New paper presented in ERSA 2020

This is our new paper with Andre Carrascal Incera and George Willis on Material and immaterial regional interdependencies: using the web to predict regional trade flows.

We model and predict interregional trade flows for the UK using the digital traces that interregional trade leaves behind. We scrape open web data containing hyperlinks between commercial websites and apply ML techniques for out-of-sample predictions. Our main hypothesis is that such hyperlinks reflect business and trade relations.

The first result support this hypothesis and the presentation is available here.