Research

Selected Papers

Customer Data and the Digital Age (Working Paper, JMP)

Many consider data as the most valuable resource in today's economy, yet they fail to quantify that. This paper studies customer data as an intangible capital and tackles this measurement problem. I build a novel database by merging Compustat with online clickstream data recording clicks of around 200 million users. That provides proxies for data inflow based on visit metrics. I document that firms' stock of customer data is distributed according to a right-skewed log-normal distribution with a fat tail. Furthermore, I report a positive correlation between sales and data inflow and between data stock and profit as well as productivity. Relying on these insights, I develop a theory of customer data, where monopolistic firms have three departments: a usual Dixit-Stiglitz production department, a sales department collecting customer data as a byproduct, and a data department investing in software to extract taste predictions from data. I prove that firms with large data stocks have lower labor shares and face unfair antitrust policies. Additionally, I leverage the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown as a natural experiment to identify my model. I find that, in retail, slightly higher than one-third of firm profit comes from its stock of customer data.

A Theory of Firm Size and Firm Dynamics: Personnel Management Approach (Working Paper)

This paper develops a new theory of firm size and firm dynamics. I employ personnel economics approaches within the span of control model in macroeconomics. The model generates increasing concentration and decreasing labor share of income over time without forcing any kinds of inefficiency. Personnel management and entrepreneurial risk in the model are the key determinants of the overwhelmingly discussed recent macro trends. A declining supervision cost enables better managers to expand their firms resulting in a more concentrated economy and a more risky entrepreneurial environment. Risk-taking entrepreneurs are compensated with a growing profit leading to a diminishing labor share.

Fostering Private-Sector-Led Growth in the MENA Region: A New Role for the State (IMF, 2022) (with M. Petrescu and S. Tambunlertchai)