Tim Taylor ("The Data Revolution and Economic Research"):
Empirical research in economic is being revolutionized (and no, that word is not too strong) by two major new sources of data: administrative data and private sector data. ...
To grasp the magnitude of the change, you need to know that a two or more decades ago, economists had only a few main sources of data: there was data produced by the government for public consumption like all the economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic or the Bureau of Labor, the surveys from the US Census, and a few other major surveys. Sometimes, economists also constructed their own data by working in library archives or carrying out their own surveys. For example, I remember as an undergraduate back around 1980 I remember doing basic empirical exercises where you wrote programs (stored on punch cards!) to find correlations between GDP, unemployment, interest rates, and car sales. I remember as a graduate student in the early 1980s compiling data on the miles-per-gallon of new cars, which involved collecting the annual paper brochures from the US Department of Transportation and then inputting the date to a computer file (no more punchcards by then!). As Einav and Levin put it: "Even 15 or 20 years ago, interesting and unstudied data sets were a scarce resource." ...
Finally, many more economists are creating their own data by carrying out their own social experiments and surveys. ...
via conversableeconomist.blogspot.com
I had the same experience as an undergraduate in 1980 and as a graduate student in the early 1980s, entering data by hand from a government document into a SAS program. My own research has been revolutionized by online surveys. My first three surveys were conducted by mail on a shoestring budget. I formatted the questions in WordPerfect, stuffed the envelopes and stressed out about the response rate for nearly a month. This have really changed. It is possible to get a nationally representative sample from an online panel vendor for as little as $3-$4 per completed questionnaire.
If you go local it can be even cheaper. During the past two weeks I've conducted a survey for a bike race (participant satisfaction, economic impact and stated preference). The organizers sent me an email list with the participants and I reached a 50% response rate after a couple of emails. I've collected so much data with a budget of near zero (the only cost is my SurveyMonkey account) over the last several years that I don't have time to analyze it, much less write a paper (I have been able to get two short papers published (with students) and have a third R&R that I hope to send back this week, but most of the data has gone untouched except by students in courses).
