This paper introduces the OECD Weekly Tracker of economic activity for 46 OECD and G20 countries using Google Trends search data. The Tracker performs well in pseudo-real time simulations including around the COVID-19 crisis. The underlying model adds to the previous Google Trends literature in...

Official Development Assistance amounted USD 146.6 billions in 2017 but do we know how much of this aid contributed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? And to what SDG in particular? This paper present a new methodology using machine learning designed to link project-based flows to the...

Not long before the coronavirus outbreak, fears about artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machines resulting in a jobless society were widespread. Concerns have resurfaced in light of the COVID-19 crisis potentially accentuating automation. This study utilises a novel big data set based...

This report uses a standard gravity setup to analyse the determinants of e-commerce, using data on online credit card payments by private Spanish customers of the multinational bank BBVA. The results show that the gravity model applies well to credit card payments, explaining up to 95% of the...

Computational methods to gauge investor sentiment from commonly used online data sources that rely on machine learning classifiers and lexicons have shown considerable promise, but suffer from measurement and classification errors. In our work, we develop a simple, direct and unambiguous...

Changes in the sentiment of Dutch public social media messages were compared with changes in monthly consumer confidence over a period of three-and-a-half years, revealing that both were highly correlated (up to r = 0.9) and that both series cointegrated. This phenomenon is predominantly...

New data sources, commonly referred to as “Big Data”, have attracted growing interest from National Statistical Institutes. They have the potential to complement official and more conventional statistics used, for instance, to determine progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals...

This paper explores one distinctive form of the ‘big data’ of economics – individual tax record microdata – and its potential for tax policy analysis. The paper draws on OECD collaborations with Slovenia and Ireland in 2018 where tax microdata was used. Most empirical economics is based...