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...

The growing literature studying the determinants of subjective wellbeing find that Mexicans report, on average, levels of life satisfaction that are above what would be predicted by the available objective measures of well-being. This paradox raises the following question: Are the drivers of...

Spain has experienced a dramatic business cycle, starting with a large construction based boom followed by a long recession, resulting in a substantial rise in unemployment, and income and wealth inequality. This paper uses longitudinal data from the Survey of Household Finances over the period...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper we assess the merits of financial condition indices constructed using simple averages versus a more sophisticated alternative that uses factor models with time varying parameters. Our analysis is based on data for 18 advanced and emerging economies at a monthly frequency covering...

Portugal has notably increased its international openness over recent decades, with exports’ share of GDP rising by 20 percentage points since 1993. This analysis couples microdata with panel regression techniques to investigate the drivers of Portuguese export growth over the 1995-2016...

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...

We study the impact of changes in regulations and policy interventions on systemic risk among European sovereigns measured as volatility spillovers in respective credit risk markets. Our unique intraday CDS dataset allows for precise measurement of the effectiveness of these events in a network...