Special Topic: Economic Analysis of "Big Data"

Description

Course Content
With the decrease of the cost of storing data, both the size and the variety of available data has increased dramatically. In this course, we will discuss how such ‘big data’ is affecting both the economy itself and how the economy can be analysed. We will analyse the impact of ‘big data’ on the economy through various examples of how businesses and governments can benefit from big data, but also of how big data can be abused by them. We also discuss how ‘big data’ has created new ways to analyse the economy, by providing new ways to collect data (for example, web scraping) and by creating new types of data (for example, Google Trend/Correlate data, Text data and Image data) that can be used to analyse the economy.

This course will combine economics and econometrics, with elements from computer programming and machine learning.  We will scrape data from priceme.co.nz to estimate the determinants of prices of fridges, use the API’s of Twitter and the New York Times to analyse text, and ‘predict the present’ with Google Correlate and Google Trends. We also will use econometric case studies to compare traditional econometrics techniques to machine learning techniques, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.