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Iranian economist Maryam Farboodi scoops 2024 research prize
Established in 1998, the Elaine Bennett Research Prize recognizes and honors outstanding research studies in any fields of economics.
Farboodi completed her BS in Sharif University of Technology of Tehran.
The researcher will formally be conferred the prize at the Business Meeting and Award Ceremony of the American Economic Association (AEA) on January 4, 2025.
She is an Applied theorist whose research focuses on the economics of Big Data with applications to finance and macroeconomics. She also works on developing methodologies to estimate the value of data.
Most recently, her research has focused on understanding the COVID-19 pandemic and associated policies. In her work, Farboodi identifies the key questions of our times and provides conceptual frameworks to address them.
She has made significant contributions to the understanding of how economic growth interacts with the evolving role of Big Data in the financial sector. Her influential paper with Laura Veldkamp, “Long-Run Growth of Financial Data Technology,” published in the American Economic Review, demonstrates how improvement in Big Data technologies influences market dynamics and investor behavior.
In another paper with the same co-author, published in the Review of Financial Studies, Farboodi investigates how the accumulation of Big Data affects firms of different sizes. The findings show that while large publicly traded firms benefit disproportionately from enhanced data processing capabilities, smaller firms do not experience the same advantages—an observation with profound implications for capital allocation and firm dynamics.
This work addresses a pressing issue in macroeconomics, given the growing dominance of technology companies that have been accumulating vast amounts of data about households and businesses.