Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are pushing today's technology frontier. And critical to their enterprises are economists who've honed their skills at universities.

In the Winter 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists Susan Athey and Michael Luca outlined this growing, mutual influence between economics and the tech industry.

Athey and Luca have spent their careers with one foot in academia and the other in the tech sector. Athey—in addition to being a professor at Stanford—served as chief economist at Microsoft and currently sits on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, and Ripple. Luca is a professor at Harvard and works with a variety of tech companies. His efforts at Yelp led to the creation of an economic research initiative there.

Athey says that economists have the training and tools to make meaningful contributions at tech companies, while also feeling intellectually challenged.

The AEA spoke with Athey and Luca about the many new opportunities for collaboration between tech companies with large amounts of data and economists looking to experiment in the digital economy.