Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a potentially powerful tool in the fight against the COVID- 19 pandemic. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, there has been a scramble to use AI. This article provides an early, and necessarily selective review, discussing the contribution of AI to the fight...

This paper focuses on the spatial variation in the uptake of social security benefits following a large and detrimental exogenous shock. Specifically, we focus on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We construct a two-period panel of 66 Territorial...

This paper investigates the regional differences in the spread of COVID-19 infections in Germany. A machine learning selection procedure is used to reduce variables from a pool of potential influencing variables. The empirical analysis shows that both regional structural variables and regionally...

I create a time series of weekly ratios of Google searches, in the US, on buying and selling in the Real Estate Category of Google Trends. I call this ratio the Google US Housing Market BUSE Index or simply the BUSE index. It expresses the number of "buy"-searches for each "sell"-search which,...

Traffic jams are an important problem both on an individual and on a societal level and much research has been done on trying to explain their emergence. The mainstream approach to road traffic monitoring is based on crowdsourcing roaming GPS devices such as cars or cell phones. These systems...

In a bold and risky political move the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras called for a referendum on June 27 2015 quitting ongoing negotiations with Greece's creditors in Brussels. The referendum framed as a yes or no question asked the Greek voters to decide whether or not they approve or...

On February 20 2015 Irish Premier Enda Kenny confirmed that a "yes-no" referendum on same sex marriage would be held on May 22 of the same year. A yes vote would legalise same sex marriage in Ireland. As the Irish premier put it, the vote was about "tolerance, respect and sensitivity". The...

We take a fresh look at firms' innovation-productivity linkages, using novel data capturing new aspects of innovative activity. We combine UK administrative microdata, media and website content to develop experimental metrics – new product/service launches – for a large panel of SMEs....