Part I: Research Design and Gravity Foundations

Part I introduces NREC6006 as a replication-based graduate research workshop in applied international trade. The course is centered on a Post-Soviet gravity paper, a cleaned bilateral dataset, and the translation of gravity workflows into transparent Python code.

Students begin with replication because it teaches the discipline of empirical research: understand the paper, rebuild the data, reproduce the tables, diagnose differences, and only then extend the design to a new question. The reference dataset contains 5,253 observations, 15 exporters, 15 importers, and years 1992-2020. Core institutional variables are \(wto\_joint\), \(EU\_joint\), and \(EAEU\_joint\).

Chp	Topic	Main Output
01	Overview	Replication roadmap
02	Trade research	Research question map
03	Gravity theory	Gravity concept note

This part contributes to the final publication-style paper by showing how a gravity paper is built from a research question, dataset, estimator sequence, robustness logic, and interpretation. The final course output is a reproducible Python notebook and a publication-style gravity research paper.