Knowledge Accumulation, Privacy, and Growth in a Data Economy
构建内生增长模型，研究消费者生成数据对知识积累的作用，发现分散经济虽能与社会最优同速增长，但研发部门劳动力不足且数据过度使用，补贴创新者比直接数据管制更有效。
We build an endogenous growth model with consumer-generated data as a new key factor for knowledge accumulation. Consumers balance between providing data for profit and potential privacy infringement. Intermediate good producers use data to innovate and contribute to the final good production, which fuels economic growth. Data are dynamically nonrival with flexible ownership while their production is endogenous and policy-dependent. Although a decentralized economy can grow at the same rate (but are at different levels) as the social optimum on the Balanced Growth Path, the R&D sector underemploys labor and overuses data—an inefficiency mitigated by subsidizing innovators instead of direct data regulation. As a data economy emerges and matures, consumers’ data provision endogenously declines after a transitional acceleration, allaying long-run privacy concerns but portending initial growth traps that call for interventions. This paper was accepted by Kay Giesecke, finance.