Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi is an economist at the Office of Financial Research (OFR), an organization created by Congress after the recent financial crisis to develop standards, data and research to facilitate financial stability. Before coming to OFR, she studied backer behavior and what makes projects successful at Kickstarter. Her work using textual analysis to design methods to map out technology landscapes of startups and their investors at Quid has been featured in BusinessWeek, the Harvard Business Review, and The Telegraph. She has also designed a variety of economic models and analyses for the Departments of Defense, Treasury, State, Homeland Security, NSF, and White House. Ayeh has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland and a bachelor's degree in Physics and Economics from Caltech. The views expressed in her posts are her own and not that of her employer. Ayeh blogs about economics, textual analysis and life at http://www.heyayeh.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @heyayeh.