HKS Affiliated Authors

Excerpt

Nowcasting the Local Economy: Using Yelp Data to Measure Economic Activity at Scale. Edward Glaeser, Michael Luca, 2017, Paper, "Can new data sources from online platforms help to measure local economic activity at scale? Government datasets from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau have long been the gold standard for measuring economic activity at the local level. However, these statistics typically appear only after multi-year lags, and the public-facing versions are aggregated to the county or ZIP code level. In contrast, crowdsourced data from online platforms such as Yelp are often contemporaneous and geographically finer than official government statistics. In this paper, we present evidence that Yelp data can complement government surveys by measuring economic activity in close to real time, at a granular level." Link