RIETI Open BBL Webinar

The Great Firewall and Knowledge Diffusion

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This paper examines the role of internet restrictions on the flow of knowledge across borders.
China, through the Great Firewall (GFW), imposes substantial restrictions on the flow of data in and out of the country including blocking Google.com and its subdomains. Webpages of academic researchers that are hosted on sites.google.com are blocked in China. We find that research articles written by authors who host their personal website on sites.google.com have significantly fewer citations and that the reduced citations begin at the same time as the Chinese restrictions on Google. The reductions in citations is even larger for papers that reference China in the title or abstract even if those papers are not hosted on a google site.
The reduced citations are largest for young research teams. Published papers by China-based teams are less likely to cite published papers with at least one author hosting on Google Sites.

Information

  • Time and Date: 12:15-13:15, Thursday, October 2, 2025 (JST)
  • Venue: Online
  • Language: English
  • Admission: Free
  • Host: Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI)
  • Contact: Ms. TAKEKAWA, Conference Section
    *If the "Send by mailer" button does not work, please copy the address into your email "send to" field and connect the prefix and the suffix of the address with an "@", sending it normally.

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Speakers

Speaker:
  • Andrew B. BERNARD (Kadas T'90 Distinguished Professor, Tuck School of Business)
    Andrew Bernard has been on the faculty at Tuck since 1999 and in 2017 was named the Kadas T’90 Distinguished Professor. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in economics in 1991 and was on the faculty at MIT and Yale prior to coming to Tuck. During 2017-2018, he was a visiting Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. In 2018-2019, he visited the Department of Economics at the University of Oslo as a World Leading Scholar.
    Professor Bernard is an expert in international trade and investment and specializes in firm responses to globalization. In recent papers, he has documented the emergence of factory-less goods producers in the US, revisited traditional views of deindustrialization and explored the dynamics of new exporters and the role of intermediaries in global trade. His current research focuses on the evolution of global (and domestic) production networks and the consequences for firm performance.
    In 2022 Professor Bernard was invited to give the Ohlin Lecture at the Stockholm School of Economics. He was named by Thompson Reuters as one of the Most Highly Cited Researchers every year from 2014-2020 and is among the 100 most cited economists. He received a National Science Foundation grant to study firm responses to international trade. In addition to being published in top academic journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economic Studies, his research has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Good Morning America, MSNBC, NPR's Morning Edition, Marketplace Morning Report, the BBC, and in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, the Economist, Nikkei, Fortune, and Business Week.
Commentator:
  • SAITO Yukiko (Senior Fellow (Specially Appointed), RIETI / Professor, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University)
Moderator:
  • TOMIURA Eiichi (President and Chief Research Officer (CRO), RIETI / Dean, Faculty of Data Science, Otsuma Women's University)