Silva and Tenreyro wasn’t just an influential article, it defined my interest in gravity models to the point I wrote a master’s thesis on it for UN ESCAP. Here I replicate the main results from the original article in R.

The original results were obtained in Stata back in 2006. The idea here is to be explicit regarding the conceptual approach to regression in R. For most of the replication I used base R without external libraries (i.e packages) except when it was absolutely necessary. Much of the methods exposed here lead to the exact same results as using the gravity package which provides convenient wrappers for gravity estimation.

All questions are welcome to the address [email protected].

These notes were written with varsityblues.

Silva, JMC Santos, and Silvana Tenreyro. “The Log of Gravity.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 88, no. 4 (2006): 641–58.