I study economic growth, innovation, and technological change — with a particular interest in using text as data.
I am an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. My research uses textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls to trace how new technologies are created, diffuse across places and workers, and reshape wages, productivity, and inflation.
Reach me at aakash.kalyani@outlook.com, or download my CV.
This site is curated by me and does not reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.
Working Papers
The pace of technology creation is a key driver of wage inequality across space and time. College-educated workers learn to use new technologies faster than others, and this advantage dissipates slowly as technologies become standardized and easier to use.
Combining textual analysis of earnings calls with the principle that cost-minimizing firms equate marginal costs across inputs, we build a novel measure of firm-level marginal labor cost that outperforms conventional slack variables in forecasting inflation.
The divergence between rising patents and falling productivity growth is explained by a decline in patent creativity — the share of novel technical terminology in patents. A third of the decline is due to a lack of new inventors.
In the media: St. Louis Fed · Forbes
A novel text-to-data approach separates adapted from non-adapted features in home listings. Rising price premia for adapted homes suggest growing demand for private adaptation since the 2000s, with the housing stock catching up slowly as households renovate.
Publications
Using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls, we track the development and diffusion of new technologies. Development is highly concentrated geographically; hiring then spreads across places and skill levels as technologies mature — a slow process taking around 50 years.
We describe how simple methods from computational linguistics can be applied to unstructured corporate texts for economic surveillance.
Policy Writing
Discussions