This report examines whether Google search queries can be used to predict the present and the near future house prices in Finland. Compared to a simple benchmark model, Google searches improve the prediction of the present house price index by 7.5 % measured by mean absolute error. In addition,...

In order to shed light on the consequences of the ongoing financial crisis, ETLA conducted two surveys at the end of October 2008. The firm survey targeted firms employing at least 10 persons in Finland (2,017 observations with a response rate of 33%) and the consumer survey targeted...