IEM Lab HBS AI Institute

Innovations in Economic Measurement Lab

Measuring an economy
in motion.

We combine artificial intelligence and big data to develop the next generation of economic measures.

Explore our work
Cambridge, MA AI · Big Data · Economics
01 Our mission

The economy changes faster than traditional statistics can capture.

IEM Lab builds new measurement systems from the digital traces of economic life. By pairing large-scale data with the rapidly expanding capabilities of AI, we turn messy, high-frequency information into public evidence—rigorous enough for research, timely enough for decisions.

From papers to production

Build living measures.

Statistics that update with the economy, improve through use, and inform decisions in real time.
01

Measure now.

Capture the economy as it changes—not months or years after the fact.

02

Publish continuously.

Turn research into transparent statistics and tools that stay current.

03 ↺

Learn in production.

Let every release improve the method—and give policymakers evidence for decisions today.

02 Current work

Four projects.
One measurement frontier.

Our research agenda spans real-time trade policy, universal classification, labor markets, and open data infrastructure.

01

Trade · Real-time data

Tariff Tracker II

Tracking how the new round of 2026 tariffs moves through prices and supply chains.

A high-frequency view of tariff incidence, building on the Pricing Lab’s pioneering approach to online price measurement.

Launching SoonAlberto Cavallo · Franco Vazquez
02

Labor · AI economy

The Human Work Behind AI

Measuring hiring and wages in the fast-growing market for AI training data.

A Market for Human Expertise documents the emerging demand for occupation-specific knowledge used to train intelligent systems.

New resultsAlberto Cavallo · Zoe CullenExplore project
03

Infrastructure · Open data

Cluster Living Data

An AI-driven aggregator that continuously finds, cleans, and shares public economic data.

A continuously updated public layer for economic evidence, designed to be explored by people and accessed programmatically through an MCP server.

Launching SoonAlberto Cavallo
04

AI · Classification

Zero-Training Classifier

A flexible AI classifier that adapts to any classification system—without pre-training.

From COICOP to Harmonized System codes, a general-purpose tool for mapping unstructured economic data into established taxonomies.

Launching SoonAlberto Cavallo · Franco Vazquez
03 People

A team built to measure
what comes next.

Economists building measurement tools for questions that have only just become possible to ask.

Alberto Cavallo

Principal Investigator

Alberto Cavallo

Professor, Harvard Business School
Franco Vazquez

Pre-doctoral Fellow

Franco Vazquez

Innovations in Economic Measurement Lab
Christina Jarymowycz

Assistant Director of Labs

Christina Jarymowycz

HBS AI Institute

Research collaborators

Zoe Cullen

Professor
Harvard Business School

Santiago A. Saldívar

Research Associate, Economics
OpenAI

Paola Llamas

PhD Student in Economics
New York University

04 Our Story

Fifteen years of seeing the economy differently.

IEM Lab carries forward a research tradition that began by using millions of online prices to reinvent inflation measurement. Today, AI opens the same possibility across the economy.

Billion Prices Project

Online data changes how inflation can be measured.

Pricing Lab

Real-time price research becomes a public data platform.

IEM Lab

AI expands the frontier of economic measurement.

A new measurement agenda

Better data changes
what we can see.

Explore the projects ↗