“Administrative data” refers to information gathered for purposes other than research. Examples include educational, legal, hospital, commercial, and other transaction records compiled either by the public or private institutions. Such data could be extremely valuable in economics research but the process of compiling it can be complicated, expensive, and frustrating—with data quality, privacy, and documentation issues representing only some of the common problems facing researchers. As a result, we still have a limited understanding of how valuable administrative data is for economics research. This grant supports Abishek Nagaraj, head of the Data Innovation Lab at the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, who seeks to derive fundamental economic estimates of the value of administrative data. Nagaraj will analyze the role administrative data plays in determining the quality, rate, and direction of science, with a particular focus on economics research and policy. Though his initial focus is on evaluating the value of public sector data—with a focus on the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers—Nagaraj foresees a second phase of his work that would study the value to researchers of administrative data compiled by the private sector. The project will explore topics such as: which types of research benefit from administrative data access; how data access impacts faculty and students differently; the heterogeneous impact of data access across researchers’ demographics and the status of their institutions; the impact of data access on the diversity of research topics studied and demographics in academia; how data access shapes the balance between theoretical and empirical approaches in economics; and the mechanisms through which data access translates into career outcomes.