We show that Google search activity on relevant terms is a strong out-of-sample predictor for future employment growth in the US over the period 2004-2019 at both short and long horizons. Starting from an initial search term ''jobs'', we construct a large panel of 172 variables using Google's...

Forecasting a macroeconomic variable is challenging in an environment with many potential predictors whose predictive ability can vary over time. We compare two approaches to forecasting U.S. employment growth in this type of environment. The first approach applies bootstrap aggregating...