Economic Indicators

The Economic Indicators project aims to understand the relationship between economic conversation during COVID-19 and different economic indicators and policy decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting government restrictions dramatically affected many industries and led to record high levels of unemployment in April 2020. Other researchers have used Twitter data to create indexes of job loss, job search, and job posting (Antenucci et al., 2014) and used search data to evaluate economic sentiment during the COVID pandemic (van der Wielen & Barrios, 2020). This project seeks to expand on this work to understand whether online conversation can serve as economic indicators in order to see the effect of policy decisions such as stay-at-home orders and the economy.

Project Team

The research team conducting analysis of the results of this project are Brad Jensen, Jonathan Ladd and Lisa Singh from Georgetown University, and Michael Traugott and Ceren Budak from the University of Michigan.