Economic Analysis of "Big Data"

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', and the 'artificial intelligence' that may result from it, is affecting both the economy itself and how the economy can be analysed. We will analyse the impact of big data and artificial intelligence on the economy through various examples of how businesses and governments can benefit from big data and artificial intelligence, but also of how big data and artificial intelligence can be abused by them. We also discuss how big data and artificial intelligence 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.