On Thursday, February 20, Laura Veldkamp joined Markus’ Academy for a conversation. Veldkamp is the Leon G. Cooperman Professor of Finance & Economics at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.
Data is one of the most valuable assets in the modern economy, but it is also one of the hardest to measure
Drawing from her research and recent book with Isaac Baley, The Data Economy, Veldkamp discussed the reasons and implications of these measurement problems, along with potential solutions
The value of data is hard to measure because it is exchanged through barter and bundled within traditional transactions. When a customer buys a product with money they also provide data in the process. Firms get paid both with money and data
The literature has followed three approaches to value data: (1) seeing data as a driver of firm productivity and valuing data through value functions, (2) seeing data as a complementary input, and (3) valuing data based on the present discounted value of the revenues it generates