Daily Economic Indicators Based on Google Searches

Angelica Becerra et al., trendecon team

During the Covid-19 pandemic, information and the (economic and social) situation has changed rapidly. Traditional (economic) indicators are not sufficiently frequent to monitor and forecast (economic and social) activity at high frequency. We use Google search trends to overcome this data gap and create meaningful indicators. We extract daily search data on keywords reflecting consumers' perception of the economic situation. The indicators are available at www.trendecon.org.

An accompaning R package contains the code to construct long daily time series from Google Trends. Robustness of the data is achieved by querying Google mulitple times. The queries are sampled at daily, weekly and monthy frequencies and then harmonized such that the long term trend is preserved. A more detailed methodological description is given on the website. We are currently summarizing these results in a research paper.

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