Making connections: Social networks in international business JIBS2020

Insights from social network research have generated significant advancements in disciplines such as sociology, economics, and psychology. In comparison, the incorporation of social network ideas into international business (IB) research remains more limited. The purpose of this special issue is to foster further research on social networks in IB. In our introductory essay, we provide a brief overview of network research in the IB domain to give a sense of some of the major ongoing themes and to illustrate how the social network approach can provide fresh insights and add substantive value to the field. To emphasize the considerable potential of using social network theories and ideas to advance research and understanding in IB, we also indicate some future directions. We follow these with a summary of the five articles in the special issue.

Research Directions For Sharing Economy Issues

The sharing economy proposes a new approach to designing and delivering products and services, that aims at avoiding waste, improving efficiency, and favouring a bottom-up change. In this research commentary, we survey the current state of things and propose some directions for research. We first describe the industries, products, and services currently embracing the sharing paradigm, the technology platforms enabling it, the business models driving it, and the regulatory issues. We envisage that promising areas of research should include: 1) devising more efficient algorithms; 2) considering ecological and pro-social objective functions; 3) dealing with regulatory issues; 4) expanding the span of research to cover more geographical areas and a wider set of services; 5) supporting services with more reliable reputation and recommendation systems.

国际贸易会加剧经济波动吗？

CKLT（2020）回答了一个根本性的问题：国际贸易会放大还是缩小一国的经济波动？无疑，这一问题具有重要的理论和现实意义。通常我们在思考国际贸易的时候，都认为贸易会增加经济的运行效率，但也同时放大了风险。因此最优的开放程度是在提高效率与降低风险二者之间取得一个平衡。

但CKLT不信这个邪。他们指出，理论上，国际贸易可能放大也可能减小经济波动。主要原因如下：

(1) 行业层面的专业化效应(specialization effect)：贸易使一国专注于生产具有比较优势的产品，专业化加强，因此经济更容易受到特定行业冲击(sector-specific shocks)的影响，放大经济的波动性。举个栗子，沙特经济大量依赖原油出口，一旦国际油价暴跌，沙特的日子就不好过。

(2) 国家层面的分散化效应(diversification effect)： 但另一方面，贸易使得国家层面的需求和供给冲击能够相互对冲，从而减少一国经济的波动性。比如，当中国内需不好的时候，我们可以通过出口来提振经济。当本土粮食减产的时候，可以通过进口粮食来补窟窿。只要国家层面的需求和供给冲击不是过分同步，贸易就可以分散风险。

(3) 此外，行业上的专业化也不一定就会放大经济波动。如果一国在开放贸易之后会更多从事那些波动率本身比较小的行业，贸易也可能通过专业化减弱经济波动。

综上所述，贸易是否会放大经济波动，是一个实证问题。因此，作者采用了目前国际贸易文献中最时髦的Eaton-Kortum模型，采用全球25个国家，24个行业，横跨35年的数据对模型进行了估计和校准。