In this paper we explore how satellite images of global night lights from the years 2001 to 2007 can be used to estimate economic activity at the sub-regional level in the U.S., India and China. The night lights based estimates of economic activity are then spatially analyzed and compared with...

Over a period of little more than five years, Blockchain, a cryptographic tamper-proof record keeping solution with decentralized control and distributed processing has become a go-to technology that appears to provide a permanence of verified provable record keeping in a fast- changing...

Money - a medium of exchange and store of value - has been evolving ever since its inception a few thousand years ago. Among many evolutionary changes, the one that occurred in the first decade of 21st century is likely to be a defining moment that will divide the history of money into two...

In this research note we report on our current efforts on developing a leading indicator of housing prices that could be used to forecast housing prices. Specifically we use Google search index at city level to predict Case-Shiller index. The methodology is based on Granger causality where we...

Over the last several decades the scientific world has seen an unprecedented growth in new knowledge, accompanied by an explosive growth in scholarly literature published in a rising number of journals. Conventional wisdom tells us that the new knowledge is built on top of current knowledge,...

This paper examines the role of regional poverty on the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.A. It also verifies if the effects differ with the concentration of ethnic minorities. We find that poverty is a significant and consistent determinant of higher COVID-19 infections and fatalities. The prevalent...

Big data holds tremendous potential for public policy analysis. At the same time, its use prompts a number of issues related to statistical bias, privacy, equity, and governance, among others. Accordingly, there is a need to formulate, evaluate, and implement policies that not only mitigate the...