Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca write,

Our results highlight the potential for using Yelp data to complement CBP by nowcasting – in other words, by shedding light on recent changes in the local economy that have not yet appeared in official statistics due to long reporting lags. A second potential use of crowd-sourced data is to measure the economy at a more granular level than can be done in public facing government statistics. For example, it has the potential to shed light on variation in economic growth within a metropolitan area. In Section V, we turn to New York City to see how Yelp does at measuring the micro-geography of a municipality. Yelp does seem capable of tracking the evolution of neighborhoods even below the ZIP code level.

CBP = County Business Patterns, a government statistical publication.

I am interested in the potential to be able to use new data sources to decompose the U.S. economy into regions. These might be actual regions, like the Mid-Atlantic or virtual regions, like the major metros on the two coasts.