Modeling Economic Networks with Firm-to-Firm Wire Transfers

We study a novel economic network comprised of wire transfers (electronic payment transactions) among the universe of firms in Brazil (6.2 million firms). We construct a directed and weighted network in which vertices represent cities and edges connote pairwise economic dependence between cities. Each city (vertex) represents the collection of all firms within that city. Edge weights are modeled by the total amount of wire transfers that arise due to business transactions between firms localized at different cities. The rationale is that the more they transact with each other, the more dependent they become in the economic sense. We find a high degree of economic integration among cities in the trade network, which is consistent with the high degree of specialization found across Brazilian cities. We are able to identify which cities have a dominant role in the entire supply chain process using centrality network measures. We find that the trade network has a disassortative mixing pattern, which is consistent with the power-law shape of the firm size distribution in Brazil. After the Brazilian recession in 2014, we find that the disassortativity becomes even stronger as a result of the death of many small firms and the consequent concentration of economic flows on large firms. Our results suggest that recessions have a large impact on the trade network with meaningful and heterogeneous economic consequences across municipalities.

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