Nowcasting and forecasting the monthly food stamps data in the US using online search data.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Fantazzini D
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4219814 | biostudies-literature | 2014
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Nowcasting and forecasting the monthly food stamps data in the US using online search data.
PloS one 20141104 11
We propose the use of Google online search data for nowcasting and forecasting the number of food stamps recipients. We perform a large out-of-sample forecasting exercise with almost 3000 competing models with forecast horizons up to 2 years ahead, and we show that models including Google search data statistically outperform the competing models at all considered horizons. These results hold also with several robustness checks, considering alternative keywords, a falsification test, different ou ...[more]
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