Data Prizes

I suspect greater payoffs will come from more data than from more technique.

So said Alan Greenspan and I think he is right.  Think of how much important work, for example, has been based on the Summers-Heston, Penn World Tables.  Yet, most of the time the collectors of data toil in the fields unrecognized and unrewarded.  When original data is collected it's often hoarded - better to mine it for yourself than open up the commons.  Now, that is a tragedy.

We ought to increase rewards to data collection.  As a salutary example, which might be emulated by the AEA and others, Mike Kellerman points to the Dataset Award given by the APSA Comparative Politics section for "a publicly available data set that has made an important contribution to the field of comparative politics."