Andrew B. BERNARD (Kadas T'90 Distinguished Professor, Tuck School of Business)
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)
Announcement
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.
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