Macro Musings with David Beckworth · Monday, July 13, 2026
Stefan Luck discussed how advancements in technology, specifically optical character recognition and Python pipelines, have made it feasible to systematically extract data from historical documents. This has enabled his research agenda, which focuses on using historical microdata to answer fundamental questions in macroeconomics and finance.
“So Sergio and I, we chatted a lot, and one day we came across this really nice experiment in the 19th century banking markets in the United States, during the National Banking era, where there was this very nice discontinuity across otherwise very similar markets of how hard it would be to contest that market, to enter that market as a bank.”
“And so I think the most profound thing that happened when we started working together with Sergio, and he had this vision that we could actually instead of, you know, hiring a bunch of RAs and have them type data, he actually had this vision that we could use the computer to do this.”
“We could use optical character recognition, we could use advances in in layout recognition to build a Python pipeline to really systematically extract data from historical documents.”
“And this research agenda is really all about using historical micro data to go after fundamental questions in macroeconomics and finance.”