What is it about?
We look at and document surges in health related Google searches as a response to the exogenous shock of the 2008 Great Recession. We show spikes for "side effects" and for "symptoms", which can be thought of as proxies for medication intake and (self)diagnosis, coincident with the Great Recession across the G8 countries.
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Why is it important?
It contributes to our understanding of the effect of macroeconomic shocks on well being.
Perspectives
This type of data is invaluable in understanding many questions which we could only attack by survey based questionnaires. Google searches are utterances revealing condition and state of the individual because they express the demand for documents of certain kind. We can thus think of them as answers in search of the right question.
Dr Nikolaos Askitas
Institute for the Study of Labor
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Health and well-being in the great recession, International Journal of Manpower, April 2015, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/ijm-12-2014-0260.
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