Global Financial Crisis and Trade Papers: Topic Analysis Via Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model

We examine the trends in the studies published in international trade journals indexed in Web of Science (WoS) before and after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). This study investigates the 5001 abstracts of trade articles starting from the post-millennium period by addressing issues in WoS database trade journals using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model. The purpose of the study is to evaluate whether topics and words differ that have been discussed in international trade literature before and after GFC. Mostly, contain topics differ when two periods are compared, although trade agreements and disputes, stock markets, and growth issues are frequently mentioned in both periods. In the post-crisis period, volatility, banks, and firm-specific issues are more popular. It is also among the findings that Asian economies gained importance after GFC. Generally, it has been revealed that the topics and titles in the trade literature can reflect current developments in international economics. Therefore, probably for next years, advances in technology as blockchain, emerging economies –especially China and India – and firm-based micro-scale papers will dominate the trade journals.