Nowcasting unemployment rates with Google searches: Evidence from the Visegrad Group countries

Jaroslav Pavlicek () and Ladislav Krištoufek ()

No 34, FinMaP-Working Papers from Collaborative EU Project FinMaP - Financial Distortions and Macroeconomic Performance: Expectations, Constraints and Interaction of Agents

Abstract: The online activity of Internet users has repeatedly been shown to provide a rich information set for various research fields. We focus on job-related searches on Google and their possible usefulness in the region of the Visegrad Group - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Even for rather small economies, the online searches of inhabitants can be successfully utilized for macroeconomic predictions. Specifically, we study unemployment rates and their interconnection with job-related searches. We show that Google searches enhance nowcasting models of unemployment rates for the Czech Republic and Hungary whereas for Poland and Slovakia, the results are mixed.

Keywords: unemployment; Google Trends; nowcasting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E27 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-mac and nep-tra
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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Journal Article: Nowcasting Unemployment Rates with Google Searches: Evidence from the Visegrad Group Countries (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:fmpwps:34

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