Showing 1 - 10 of 114
New data-gathering techniques, often referred to as “Big Data” have the potential to improve statistics and empirical research in economics. In this paper we describe our work with online data at the Billion Prices Project at MIT and discuss key lessons for both inflation measurement and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012995985
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012863272
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013309882
Regulation consists of rulemaking and enforcement. Economic theory offers two complementary rationales for regulating financial institutions. Altruistic public-benefits theories treat rules as governmental instruments for increas- ing fairness and efficiency across society as a whole....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012774887
This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012918638
Economics and ethics both offer important perspectives on our society, but they do so from two different viewpoints … – the central focus of economics is how the price system in our economy values resources; the central focus of ethics is the … moral evaluation of actions in our society. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) forces humanity to confront new areas …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012865277
In academic and policy circles, there has been considerable interest in the impact of “big data” on firm performance. We examine the question of how the amount of data impacts the accuracy of Machine Learned models of weekly retail product forecasts using a proprietary data set obtained from...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012927020
We study a model where firms accumulate data as a valuable intangible asset. Data accumulation affects firms' dynamics. It increases the skewness of the firm size distribution as large firms generate more data and invest more in active experimentation. On the other hand, small data- savvy firms...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012893591
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012867902
Modern investors face a high-dimensional prediction problem: thousands of observable variables are potentially relevant for forecasting. We reassess the conventional wisdom on market efficiency in light of this fact. In our model economy, which resembles a typical machine learning setting, N...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012857678