Economics
The World’s Top Economists Want to Work for Amazon and Facebook
An explosion of data has made high tech a hub for the dismal scientists.
Part of the Amazon headquarters complex in Seattle.
Photographer: Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty ImagesThis article is for subscribers only.
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.