Gravity models in R

Abstract

Gravity models are used to explain bilateral flows related to the sizes of bilateral partners, a measure of distance between them and other influences on interaction costs. The underlying idea is rather simple. The greater the masses of two bodies and the smaller the distance between them, the stronger their attraction. Even though their basic idea is rather simple, gravity models can become complex regarding the choice of models or estimation methods. As especially for gravity beginners it is difficult to get an overview of the different methods and implement them in R, the package gravity provides a wrapper of different standard estimation methods. By considering the descriptions and codes of these methods, users can get a comprehensive and application-oriented access, see which method may be suitable for a certain research question or type of data, and extend the code available to their research projects.