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The Missing Value of Data
Ankit Bhutani,
Guillermo Ordoñez
& Laura Veldkamp
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Working Paper 35266
DOI 10.3386/w35266
Issue Date May 2026
Data assets are increasingly vital in modern economies, yet macroeconomic measurement is not well-adapted to capturing their value. Part of the problem is that data is an intangible asset: investments in data are missed in national accounts, and depreciation losses are missed in firms’ balance sheets. Another part, unique to data, is that it serves as a means of payment in the modern economy: consumption bartered for data is also omitted from national accounts. We propose an output-based approach to measure the missing value of data. We treat data as an asset, measure its volume based on the quality of firms’ revenue forecasts, and endogenously determine its depreciation. We then capitalize the data value and explore what the measured GDP would be if the data were treated and transacted similarly to a physical asset. Our findings suggest that the aggregate value of data is about 1.5% of GDP.
Acknowledgements and Disclosures
We thank John Fernald, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Gianluca Violante, and various seminar participants for helpful discussions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Laura Veldkamp
I have visited or lectured at the following institutions, where I have received an honorarium and/or have been paid travel expenses:
The Gate, one-time speaker honorarium,
EIEF, Rome, Italy, research visitor.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, US. As consultant to the Research Department.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, US. As consultant to the Research Department.
Goldman Sachs, as a GMI fellow.
Standard & Poors, honorarium.
University of California at Los Angeles, as a guest Ph.D. lecturer
I also received a salary from Elsevier as an editor of the Journal of Economic Theory.
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Ankit Bhutani, Guillermo Ordoñez, and Laura Veldkamp, "The Missing Value of Data," NBER Working Paper 35266 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35266.
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