New, “big” data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when...

In this paper, we highlight the potential for linked employer-employee data to be used in entrepreneurship research, describing new data on business start-ups, their founders and early employees, and providing examples of how they can be used in entrepreneurship research. Linked...

I reflect on the role of modern economic history in economics. I document a substantial increase in the percentage of papers devoted to economic history in the top-5 economic journals over the last few decades. I discuss how the study of the past has contributed to economics by providing ground...

In recent years, the increased use of “big data” and statistical techniques to score potential transactions has transformed the operation of insurance and credit markets. In this paper, we observe that these widely-used scores are statistical objects that constitute a one-dimensional summary...

We present and describe a new dataset of capital control restrictions on both inflows and outflows of ten categories of assets for 100 countries over the period 1995 to 2013. Building on the data first presented in Martin Schindler (2009), and other datasets based on the analysis of the IMF's...

We summarize existing empirical findings regarding the adoption of robotics and AI and its effects on aggregated labor and productivity, and argue for more systematic collection of the use of these technologies at the firm level. Existing empirical work primarily uses statistics aggregated by...

This chapter will cover recent research in historical economics that uses ethnographic data and data from surveys and lab experiments. The study of historical economics, particularly outside of non-Western countries, has been constrained by availability of historical data. However, recent work...

Cross-sectional or panel studies have joined time series techniques as an important element in empirical macroeconomists' toolkit. The econometric best practices for these studies and their aggregate implications remain active topics of research. In this paper, I offer several pieces of advice...

Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from hundreds of thousands of smartphone users, we quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Relative to entirely-white...

Data is nonrival: a person's location history, medical records, and driving data can be used by any number of firms simultaneously. Nonrivalry leads to increasing returns and implies an important role for market structure and property rights. Who should own data? What restrictions should apply...