Since the 2007 financial crisis, family demography research has increasingly explored the link between economic uncertainty and fertility outcomes. Studies emphasize the impact of labor market instability (Kreyenfeld et al., 2012), perceived uncertainty (Hofmann & Hohmeyer, 2013), and media coverage of the Great Recession (Schneider, 2015). Comolli (2017) demonstrated that structural factors (e.g., unemployment) and indices like the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index (Baker, Bloom & Davis, 2016) significantly predict total fertility rates. Vignoli et al. (2023) highlighted the role of media narratives on economic topics explaining fertility outcomes in Italy.
Current literature focuses on structural or media-reported uncertainty but overlooks public interest and concerns. This study introduces Google Trends (GT) as a novel tool for measuring public attention and interest in phenomena such as economic uncertainty. GT captures real-time public concern by analyzing the internet popularity of search terms, offering insights into economic narratives (e.g., housing affordability) not yet evident in conventional indicators like unemployment, EPU indices or media-reported news (Shiller, 2017).
Using longitudinal datasets (PSID, SOEP, UKHLS, SHP, HILDA), we examine how public economic concerns is associated with individual fertility outcomes by parity. While Cavalli (2020) explored GT and total fertility rates, our study uniquely integrates individual-level data with GT, enabling analysis by socioeconomic factors.
This approach bridges GT data with demographic surveys, advancing our understanding of fertility outcomes and public concerns about economic uncertainty.

Co-authors

Dr Lukasz Baszczak; Associate Professor Anna Matysiak, University of Warsaw;

Professor Daniele Vignoli, University of Florence