Big Data and Computational Social Science for Economic Analysis and Policy

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to survey the recent applications of big data in economics and finance. An important advantage of these large alternative datasets is that they provide very detailed information about economic behaviour and decisions which has spurred research aiming at answering long-standing economic questions. Another relevant characteristic of these datasets is that they might be available in real time, a property that can be used to construct economic indicators at high frequencies. Overall, big alternative datasets have the potential to make an impact on economic research and policy and to complement the information used by governmental agencies to produce the official statistics.