The paper employs a spike-and-slab technique to select Google Trends categories into an augmented autoregressive model to nowcast Sri Lanka’s consumer confidence. The paper then examines the benefits of incorporating Google Trends data in predicting consumer confidence in Sri Lanka: i....

This paper analyzes lenders' pricing strategies in the business-to-customer (B2C) unsecured loan market by using a proprietary dataset of approximately 3 million unsecured consumer loans from a B2C online retailer in China. We find that lenders' decisions to invite customers are based on...