We have seen in the past decade a sharp increase in the extent that companies use data to optimize their businesses. Variously called the `Big Data' or `Data Science' revolution, this has been characterized by massive amounts of data, including unstructured and nontraditional data like text and...

Spatial connectivity of renewable resources induces a spatial externality in extraction. We explore the consequences of decentralized spatial property rights in the presence of spatial externalities. We generalize the notion of unitization - developed to enhance cooperative extraction of oil and...

Recovery of causal relationships in data is an essential part of scholarly inquiry in the social sciences. This chapter discusses strategies that have been successfully used in urban and regional economics for recovering such causal relationships. Essential to any successful empirical inquiry is...

Geography shapes economic outcomes in a major way. This paper uses spatial empirical methods to detect and analyze trade patterns in a historical data set on Chinese rice prices. Our results suggest that spatial features were important for the expansion of interregional trade. Geography...

Recent models in economic geography suggest that there may be very large numbers of equilibrium spatial structures. Simulations suggest, however, that the structures that emerge are surprisingly orderly, and often seem approximately to follow simple rules about the spacing of urban sites. This...

The observed uneven distribution of economic activity across space is influenced by variation in exogenous geographical characteristics and endogenous interactions between agents in goods and factor markets. Until recently, the theoretical literature on economic geography had focused on stylized...

Can algorithms assist firms in their decisions on nominating corporate directors? We construct algorithms to make out-of-sample predictions of director performance. Tests of the quality of these predictions show that directors predicted to do poorly indeed do poorly compared to a realistic pool...

A forecasting comparison is undertaken in which 49 univariate forecasting methods, plus various forecast pooling procedures, are used to forecast 215 U.S. monthly macroeconomic time series at three forecasting horizons over the period 1959 - 1996. All forecasts simulate real time implementation,...