Our 25th workshop features a conversation with Tarek Hassan, Josh Lerner, and Nicholas Bloom on "The Diffusion of New Technologies" on April 29, 2024, from 9:00AM – 10:30AM PT.
The Hoover Institution Workshop on Using Text as Data in Policy Analysis showcases applications of natural language processing, structured human readings, and machine learning methods to analyze text as data for examining policy issues in economics, history, national security, political science, and other fields. Steven J. Davis and Justin Grimmer organize the workshop.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Tarek Hassan is a Professor of Economics at Boston University. His research focuses on international finance, macro-finance, and social factors in economic growth. Some of his recent papers study the effects of uncertainty on firm behavior and on the allocation of capital across countries. Another set of papers studies the effect of social structure on economic growth and the effect of historical migration and ethnic diversity on foreign direct investment. Hassan’s work has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Journal of Finance. He is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research.
Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor at Harvard Business School and Co-Director of the HBS Private Capital Project. Much of his research focuses on venture capital and private equity organizations. He also has extensively examined innovation policy.
He co-directs the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program and serves as co-editor of their publication, Entrepreneurship and
Innovation Policy and the Economy. He founded and runs the Private Capital Research Institute, a nonprofit devoted to encouraging access to data and research, and has been a frequent leader of and participant in the World Economic Forum projects and events.
In the 1993-1994 academic year, Josh introduced "Venture Capital and Private Equity” as an elective class to second-year MBAs, this class has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at Harvard Business School. He also established and teaches undergraduate and doctoral courses on entrepreneurship and teaches in a wide variety of executive courses relating to venture capital, private equity, and entrepreneurship.
Josh graduated from Yale College with a special divisional major. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He then earned a Ph.D. from Harvard's Economics Department. He was recently recognized as the 37 the most influential economist worldwide by research.com.
Nicholas Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research focuses on working from home, management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK Treasury and McKinsey & Company and the IFS. He has a BA from Cambridge, an MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of the Guggenheim and Sloan Fellowships, the Frisch Medal and a National Science Foundation Career Award. He was elected to Bloomberg50 for his advice on working from home.
On the personal side he is English, living with his Scottish wife and American kids on Stanford campus, in a multi-accented English household.
Steven J. Davis is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He studies business dynamics, labor markets, and public policy. He advises the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, co-organizes the Asian Monetary Policy Forum and is co-creator of the Economic Policy Uncertainty Indices, the Survey of Business Uncertainty, and the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Davis hosts “Economics, Applied,” a podcast series sponsored by the Hoover Institution.
Justin Grimmer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His current research focuses on American political institutions, elections, and developing new machine-learning methods for the study of politics.
