In the twenty-first century, the most valuable firms in the world are valued primarily for their data. This makes data central to finance. 
Data is an important asset to price, it changes firm valuation, and it is a key consideration for an entrepreneur starting a new firm.
The rise of the data economy is changing sources of revenue and sources of risk. The...

We study third-party data sharing---the sale of consumer data generated as a by-product of ordinary transactions---in a framework with a monopolistic seller, a privately informed consumer, and a third party whose data use imposes privacy costs on the consumer. Our analysis highlights the role of the privacy β, which captures whether consumers with a higher willingness to pay for the seller’s product are more (β > 0)...

What does market power look like in a data economy? We model data as fuel for prediction and study how it changes measured markups. Data has ambiguous effects on product markups: By reducing risk, it lowers markups. By prompting investment, it raises them. Its more distinctive effect is on aggregation. Better-informed firms shift production toward goods that have high realized profitability. This action-payoff covariance drives...