Health and well-being in the great recession

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the authors can use internet search data in order to capture the impact of the 2008 Financial and Economic Crisis on well-being. Design/methodology/approach -The authors look at the G8 countries with a special focus on USA and Germany and investigate whether internet searches reflect the "malaise" caused by the crisis. The authors focus on searches that contain the word "symptoms" and are thought to proxy self-diagnosis and those that contain "side effects" and are thought to proxy treatment. Findings -The authors find that "malaise" searches spike in a fashion coincident with the crisis and its contagion timeline across the G8 countries. The authors show that results based on search recover previously known stylized facts from the economics of health, well-being and the business cycle. Research limitations/implications -Internet penetration is high across the G8 countries. The authors nonetheless cannot get a good handle on the part of the population, which is not online. Moreover the authors cannot get a good grip on all confounding factors. More research would be necessary with access to search microdata. Originality/value -The authors propose global proxies for diagnosis and treatment based on the "search buzz" for symptoms and side effects. The authors can thus capture trends on a global scale. This approach will become increasingly important.

The Impact of Culture on Well-Being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

“…7 On the effect of temporary shocks on well-being, see e.g. Deaton (2012) or Askitas and Zimmermann (2011 Although we argue that a positive coefficient on the average satisfaction in the birth country provides evidence that culture does matter, there is a theoretical possibility that selective migration can spuriously generate this result. There is empirical evidence that immigrants are not a random sample of their birth country's population: dissatisfied people have greater intention to migrate (Otrachshenko & Popova 2014), but spurious result would require immigrants from countries with high life satisfaction levels to be systematically different regarding an unobserved variable from immigrants from countries with low life satisfaction levels.…”

Web Data Mining for Monitoring Business Export Orientation

“…These data can be used to nowcast some economic variables because some specific text querying (e.g., "apply for unemployment benefits") might correlate with some particular aspect of economy (e.g., unemployment). Since they were first introduced as an economic indicator by Choi and Varian (2009), nowcasting models with GT data have been applied to a number of situations, such as proposing indicators for investors' attention (Da et al 2011), tourist arrivals (BangwayoSkeete, Skeete 2015), business performance (Vaughan 2014), transaction volumes on the stock market (Preis et al 2010;Moat et al 2014), and well-being (Askitas, Zimmermann 2015). Although GT can supply useful hints on the economic activity at an aggregate level, its ability for characterizing individual firms is limited because it only provides data about what users demand.…”

Google search activity data and breaking trends

“…Evidence-based policy making important for some types of research (such as [1]). Protecting the privacy of individuals in this context is important and raises many legal and ethical issues.…”

“…For example, average penetration is 70% in Europe and 87% in North America. The type of socio-economic phenomena that might be detected range from emotional, psychological, and physical health [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] to economic conditions [6], [7], [8], [9], consumption [10], epidemics, and crime. That opens for the first time the possibility for a multidisciplinary holistic approach to social science and labor economics on a huge scale.…”

“…One class contains the word "symptoms" and is a proxy for medical self-diagnosis, and the other class contains the words "side effects" and is a proxy for medical treatment [1]. Google Translate was used to translate the terms into each country's language.…”