Why I joined Ramp (and why Ramp needs an economist)

My name is Ara Kharazian and I'm an economist based in New York. I've spent the last several years of my career using data to understand how businesses work and what makes some work better and faster than others.

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I was previously the Economic Research Lead at Square, where I launched the economic research function and developed Square Payroll Index, one of the key public datasets used to track service worker wages in the United States. My research has been cited in the New York Times, Planet Money, Bloomberg, and other press.

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Earlier this month, I joined Ramp. I’ll be the first member of a team dedicated to producing public-facing economic research with first-party data from Ramp. 

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When I tell people my job, some are surprised that a tech company (especially Ramp, which is known for its focus on product and design) would hire an economist that mostly won’t work on the product at all. Lately, I’ve pointed to Ramp’s mission to help businesses save time and money.

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Ramp has long used data in its product to secure better prices for buyers, automate tasks with AI, and recommend policies to streamline company spend.

“There is no public dataset that captures where and how much American businesses spend.”

Economic research can support this mission too. There is no public dataset, to my knowledge, that captures where, how much, and on what American businesses spend. And that’s a problem!

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That means we have no insight into where and how the best organizations run, where they invest, which vendors they use, and therefore no way to learn from them. Ramp’s dataset is best positioned to support the mission: a broad spectrum of U.S. corporate spend from local retailers to large software companies.

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Corporate card, bill pay, travel spend, and itemized receipts which make a powerful dataset for tracking prices, where businesses are investing, and where they’re making cuts. All anonymized and aggregated to protect the privacy of its users.

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A key principle of economics is that people make better decisions with better information—I’ll be guided by that principle. My goal is to produce work that gets us closer to answering these two questions: What makes some organizations work better and faster than others? How can other entities, including government and the public sector, learn from them?

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There are downstream consequences to this gap in public research. It means we’re designing policies and regulations around entire industries without a centralized dataset describing their financial operations. It means we’re choosing to invest taxpayer dollars in new industries without knowing exactly how that money tends to get spent. 

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My work will take an economics-approach to addressing these questions, but the goal is practical, not academic: support decision-making, and produce work to help businesses (maybe even non-profits and governments?) save time and money.

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I can’t think of a better home for this economics work. I’ll be posting here on Ramp's blog regularly, and you can also follow me on X and LinkedIn. More to come!

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