Finance Webinar（2020-05)

Topic: The Market for Data Privacy

Speaker: Tarun Ramadorai, Imperial College London; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Time: Wednesday, 8 April, 16:00-17:30 Beijing Time

Location: Microsoft Teams Online conference room

Abstract:

We scrape a comprehensive set of US firms’ privacy policies to facilitate research on the supply of data privacy. We analyze these data with the help of expert legal evaluations, and complement this analysis with data on firms’ web tracking activities. We find considerable and systematic variation in privacy policies along multiple dimensions including ease of access, length, readability, and quality, both within and between industries. We also find that large firms with intermediate knowledge capital intensity have longer, legally watertight policies, but are more likely to share user data with third parties. We set up a simple theory of big data acquisition and usage which predicts the observed relationships between firm size, knowledge capital intensity, and privacy supply.

Introduction:

Tarun Ramadorai is a Professor of Financial Economics at Imperial College London. He has a broad range of research interests in the areas of household finance, asset pricing, international finance, and real estate. He is greatly interested in finance and economics issues in emerging markets, with a particular focus on India.

He has published on these topics in a number of scholarly journals in finance and economics including the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He currently serves as an Editor of the Review of Financial Studies, and he has previously served as an Associate Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science.

Tarun is a Research Fellow of CEPR, a Senior Academic Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research (ABFER), a Council Member of the Society of Financial Studies, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER).

He has also served in a range of policy roles in addition to his academic work, including Economic Adviser to the European Securities and Markets Authority, Visiting Scholar at the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India, Member of the UK-India Financial Partnership, and Chairman of the Inter-Regulatory Committee on Household Finance constituted by the Reserve Bank of India. He is currently on the Norges Bank Investment Management Allocation Advisory Board.

Tarun has a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Williams College, an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. Prior to his role at Imperial, Tarun spent over a decade at the University of Oxford.

//www.tarunramadorai.com

Your participation is warmly welcomed!