The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Measurement and ResearchAlberto Cavallo, Roberto Rigobon
NBER Working Paper No. 22111 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 fundamental research questions in macro and international economics. In particular, we show how online prices can be used to construct daily price indexes in multiple countries and to avoid measurement biases that distort evidence of price stickiness and international relative prices. We emphasize how Big Data technologies are providing macro and international economists with opportunities to stop treating the data as “given” and to get directly involved with data collection.
Supplementary materials for this paper: Acknowledgments and Disclosures Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w22111 Published: Alberto Cavallo & Roberto Rigobon, 2016. "The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Measurement and Research," Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 30(2), pages 151-178. citation courtesy of Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:
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