Effective communication strategies regarding health issues are affected by the way in which the public obtain their knowledge, particularly whether people become interested independently, or through their social networks. This is often investigated through localized ethnography or surveys. In...

We describe an exercise of using Big Data to predict the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, a widely used indicator of the state of confidence in the US economy. We carry out the exercise from a pure ex ante perspective. We use the methodology of algorithmic text analysis of an archive of...

Both theoretical and applied economics have a great deal to say about many aspects of the firm, but the literature on the extinctions, or demises, of firms is very sparse. We use a publicly available data base covering some 6 million firms in the US and show that the underlying statistical...