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The Boston Globe reports:
Researchers have come up with a novel way of tracking unemployment that they say is much faster and more accurate than traditional estimates and surveys done by the federal government. In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, a team from Northeastern University, Harvard, and MIT found that changes in cellphone use flag shifts in joblessness two to eight weeks sooner than present methods.
There's more:
To test their theory, the team looked at two sets of records of European cellphone carriers. One set tracked the cellphone use of a town whose local manufacturing plant laid off 1,100 employees in 2006 — or 15 percent of the town’s workforce. Another looked at 10 million cellphone customers in a country that faced economic upheaval during the recession.
As they suspected, cellphone use and mobility dropped significantly in areas which eventually reported massive unemployment spikes. “We saw a dramatic collective change of behavior” in the days and weeks following layoffs, Lazer said.
Imagine that.
