Capitalizing Data: Case Studies of Tax Forms and Individual Credit Reports

Rachel Soloveichik

BEA Papers from Bureau of Economic Analysis

Abstract: Early papers on capitalizing data focused on complex digital data that are stored on supercomputers and managed by highly skilled computer scientists (Statistics Canada 2019) (Eurostat 2020) (Coyle 2022) (Calderon and Rassier 2022) (Mitchell et al. 2022). This paper studies two very different types of data: tax forms and individual credit reports. Both types of data are simple text records that can be stored on any computer or even on paper (Brenton 1964) and managed by workers with only a high school degree (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022a) (Weedmark 2021). Despite their simplicity, these two data types are expensive to create. This paper estimates that tax forms had a creation cost of $0.4 trillion in 2017 and individual credit reports had a creation cost of $0.6 trillion in 2017.

JEL-codes: D14 E01 G14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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