This report provides an overview of the relevant economic research literature on platforms or multi-sided online markets. It discusses platforms from a regulatory policy angle, including potential market failures in platforms, the extent of self-regulation and possible regulatory responses...

This paper uses a novel empirical approach to assess if the development of online platforms affects the productivity of service firms. We build a proxy measure of platform use across four industries (hotels, restaurants, taxis and retail trade) and ten OECD countries using internet search data...

"Big data" is becoming an increasingly important aspect of our daily lives as the digital sources of information and intelligence that it encompasses become more structured and more publicly available. These sources may enable the generation of new datasets providing high-frequency and timely...

The economic crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented in recent history. We contribute to a growing literature investigating the economic consequences of covid-19 by showing how unemployment-related online searches across the EU27 reacted to the introduction of lock-downs. We...

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...

We build an indicator of individual subjective well-being in the United States based on Google Trends. The indicator is a combination of keyword groups that are endogenously identified to fit with the weekly time-series of subjective well-being measures disseminated by Gallup Analytics. We find...