Extremely proud of our fantastic @LSEEcon PhD student @AnanyaKotia for winning the Daniel Cohen Award!!!

I typically do not post working papers. If anything, I prefer to write about published papers of mine (so rarely), or about the wonderful papers/colleagues from whom I learn so much (often about the #WEFIDEV network in #Finance & #Development). But this one feels a little different. "Microdata for Research in Macroeconomics and Finance" is a fun paper that I wrote along the way (@cepr_org DP link below), after @pogourinchas, #PetiaTopalova, and #NanLi from the @IMFNews reached out with the idea of taking stock of how microdata are changing research in macroeconomics and finance, stimulated by the excellent work of the @FCDOGovUK headed by @DennisNovy. The central idea is simple: over the last two decades, economics & finance have been transformed by the growing availability of granular data (credit registries, firm balance sheets, digital payments, and more). These allow us to move beyond aggregate averages & ask sharper questions. Who is constrained? Which firms respond to policy? How do payment systems reshape economic activity? Where are market imperfections most binding? And more. This matters everywhere, but especially in low-income countries, where importing policies from high-income settings can be misleading. Market frictions, informality, enforcement, institutional capacity, and financial infrastructure often differ in fundamental ways. Better policy requires understanding these mechanisms from the ground up. In the paper, I construct a new dataset of more than 1,900 academic publications using nine types of microdata, drawn from the top 50 journals in economics and finance between 2000 and 2025. The dataset combines bibliometric work, LLM-processing, and human verification.