I was sorry that I missed NABE's Big Data Conference in June. I bet it was a lot like this:
At an April meetup organized by the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), a Facebook researcher named Michael Bailey showed his peers how somebody in Detroit might be willing to pay more for a home if he or she had lots of Facebook friends living in a high-priced housing market such as San Francisco.
For their paper, Bailey and his co-authors had matched public records on 525,000 home sales to anonymized data for 1.4 million Facebook users.
It was the first formal gathering of tech company economists, according to NABE Executive Director Tom Beers, and included numerous stars of the consumer Internet. The other attendees at the daylong meeting, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, had similar tales to tell. Hal Varian, the Google economist who helped develop the AdWords marketplace, was there. Keith Chen, of Uber, presented a paper on the company’s surge-pricing policy that refuted earlier research that said taxi drivers wouldn’t work in the rain. Economists from Amazon.com, Netflix, and LinkedIn elaborated on their work as well.
Later, the group headed over to AT&T Park to watch the San Francisco Giants beat the San Diego Padres, 5-4.
“It was like a geek dream come true,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist of the real estate brokerage Redfin.
The meeting gave them all a chance to compare notes about what it’s like to be on the front lines of a new trend in the profession. U.S. companies went on an economist hiring spree in the late 1950s and 1960s as computers made econometric analysis possible and companies sought experts to forecast swings in the business cycle, Beers said. Today, businesses are once again ramping up their hiring of economists, this time spurred by a boom in web-generated data and tools for storing and sorting it.
I want to go to work for Zillow, estimating hedonic models with Zestimates. I have a student poking around the aggregate data this summer and hopefully we'll have a poster this Fall. I'll talk about it in my interview.