Book Translations as Idea Flows: The Effects of the Collapse of Communism on the Diffusion of Knowledge

Ran Abramitzsky and Isabelle Sin

No 291421, Motu Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Abstract: We use book translations as a new measure of international idea flows and study the effects of Communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe on these flows. Using novel data on 800,000 translations and difference-in-differences approaches, we show that while translations between Communist languages decreased by two thirds with the collapse, Western-to-Communist translations increased by a factor of five and quickly converged to Western levels. Convergence was more complete in more economically-useful fields such as the sciences, and was more complete in Satellite than in Soviet countries. These findings help us understand how institutions shape the international diffusion of knowledge.

Keywords: Institutional; and; Behavioral; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53
Date: 2012-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/291421/files/12_05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:motuwp:291421

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.291421

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Motu Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().