Governments have little incentive to update their methods until the flaws become so glaring that even laypeople start to notice—something that isn’t always easy. Researchers, on the other hand, have a stronger incentive to seek accurate data since faulty inputs can undermine their work. However, if corporate sponsorship grants them access to better data, they may prioritize their research over making the data publicly available.
Unlike computer science, finance and economics don’t have a strong tradition of open research. If more economists are trained as software engineers and expectations shift toward making research reproducible with public data, the spirit of open source and grassroots collaboration may create a new field for data collection and sharing.
Thanks for the comment Ethan. In the podcast Julia says that the government statisticians know the data has big problems but they are kind of powerless to change it because each agency has a very narrow mandate - funding to produce this data in this way. And I totally agree that in economics/finance data itself, and the ability to process it, is seen as a potential competitive advantage - not to be shared or in some cases not even to be talked about. I think this is where academia plays a very important role - pushing for open data.
Governments have little incentive to update their methods until the flaws become so glaring that even laypeople start to notice—something that isn’t always easy. Researchers, on the other hand, have a stronger incentive to seek accurate data since faulty inputs can undermine their work. However, if corporate sponsorship grants them access to better data, they may prioritize their research over making the data publicly available.
Unlike computer science, finance and economics don’t have a strong tradition of open research. If more economists are trained as software engineers and expectations shift toward making research reproducible with public data, the spirit of open source and grassroots collaboration may create a new field for data collection and sharing.
Thanks for the comment Ethan. In the podcast Julia says that the government statisticians know the data has big problems but they are kind of powerless to change it because each agency has a very narrow mandate - funding to produce this data in this way. And I totally agree that in economics/finance data itself, and the ability to process it, is seen as a potential competitive advantage - not to be shared or in some cases not even to be talked about. I think this is where academia plays a very important role - pushing for open data.