Young firms are central to productivity and job growth in the United States, yet they fail at high rates. We examine how a recent rise in firms' ability to access information technology as a service affected the survival and performance of young establishments in the U.S. manufacturing sector....

Digital technologies may make some tasks, jobs and firms more resilient to unanticipated shocks. We extract data from over 200 million U.S. job postings to construct an index for firms' resilience to the Covid-19 pandemic by assessing the work-from-home (WFH) feasibility of their labor demand....

Information flows, and thus information technology (IT) are central to the structure of firms and markets. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we provide firm-level evidence that increases in IT intensity are associated with increases in firm size and concentration in both employment and...

Floods are one of the most costly types of natural disasters in Australia and other parts of the world. It was reported that the average annual cost of flood damage in Australia was about $300 million as at 1994. However, the effects of flooding can be mitigated, and thereby reduce the loss of...

We develop empirical models of hedonic prices and derive hedonic indices for measuring changes in customer welfare based upon deep learning. We first generate abstract product attributes, or "features," from text descriptions and images using deep neural networks, and then use these attributes...

Accurate, real-time measurements of price index changes using electronic records are essential for tracking inflation and productivity in today's economic environment. We develop empirical hedonic models that can process large amounts of unstructured product data (text, images, prices,...