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 some...

We characterize and demonstrate a solution method for an optimal commodity (sales) tax problem consisting of multiple goods, heterogeneous agents, and a nonconvex policy maker optimization problem. Our approach allows for more dimensions of heterogeneity than has been previously possible,...

A recent literature has developed that combines two prominent empirical approaches to ex ante policy evaluation: randomized controlled trials (RCT) and structural estimation. The RCT provides a "gold-standard'' estimate of a particular treatment, but only of that treatment. Structural estimation...

This paper studies the estimation of asset pricing model regressions with conditional alphas and betas, focusing on the joint effects of data snooping and spurious regression. We find that the regressions are reasonably well specified for conditional betas, even in settings where simple...

Even though stock returns are not highly autocorrelated, there is a spurious regression bias in predictive regressions for stock returns related to the classic studies of Yule (1926) and Granger and Newbold (1974). Data mining for predictor variables interacts with spurious regression bias. The...

We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text content of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984{2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news as easily interpretable topical themes and quantifies the...

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...

We introduce a new text-mining methodology that extracts sentiment information from news articles to predict asset returns. Unlike more common sentiment scores used for stock return prediction (e.g., those sold by commercial vendors or built with dictionary-based methods), our supervised...

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...

The solar industry in the US typically uses a credit score such as the FICO score as an indicator of consumer utility payment performance and credit worthiness to approve customers for new solar installations. Using data on over 800,000 utility payment performance and over 5,000 demographic...