Virtually Borderless? Cultural Proximity and International Collaboration of Developers

Lena Abou El-Komboz and Moritz Goldbeck

No 407, ifo Working Paper Series from ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich

Abstract: Are national borders an impediment to online collaboration in the knowledge economy? Unlike in goods trade, knowledge workers can collaborate fully virtually, such that border effects might be eliminated. Here we study collaboration patterns of some 144,000 European developers on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub. To assess the presence of border effects we deploy a gravity model that explains developers’ inter-regional collaboration networks. We fnd a sizable border effect of –16.4%, which is, however, fve to six times smaller than in trade. The border effect is entirely explained by cultural factors such as common language, shared interests, and historical ties. The international border effect in Europe is much larger than the state border effect in the US, where cross-border cultural differences are much less pronounced, further strengthening our conjecture that culture is a main driver of the border effect in virtual collaboration.

Keywords: digitization; software development; knowledge work; culture; language (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F66 J61 O31 O33 O36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-ure
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Journal Article: Virtually borderless? Cultural proximity and international collaboration of developers (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ifowps:_407

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