A key challenge for research on many questions in the social sciences is that it is difficult to link historical records in a way that allows investigators to observe people at different points in their life or across generations. In this paper, we develop a new approach that relies on millions...

Policymakers can take actions to prevent local conflict before it begins, if such violence can be accurately predicted. We examine the two countries with the richest available sub-national data: Colombia and Indonesia. We assemble two decades of fine-grained violence data by type, alongside...

This paper combines a data rich environment with a machine learning algorithm to provide new estimates of time-varying systematic expectational errors ("belief distortions") embedded in survey responses. We find that distortions are large on average even for professional forecasters, with all...

Thanks to big data, artificial intelligence (AI) has spurred exciting innovations. In the meantime, AI and big data are reshaping the risk in consumer privacy and data security. In this essay, I first define the nature of the problem and then present a few facts about the ongoing risk. The bulk...

Understanding factors affecting the direction of innovation is a central aim of research in the economics of innovation. Progress on this topic has been inhibited by difficulties in measuring distance and movement in knowledge space. We describe a methodology that infers the mapping of the...

We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text content of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984{2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news as easily interpretable topical themes and quantifies the...

The last 40 years have seen huge innovations in computing technology and data availability. Data derived from millions of administrative records or by using (as we do) new methods of data generation such as text mining are now common. New data often requires new methods, which in turn can...

Big data is revolutionizing the finance industry and has the potential to significantly shape future research in finance. This special issue contains articles following the 2019 NBER/ RFS conference on big data. In this Introduction to the special issue, we define the "Big Data" phenomenon as a...