A bridge between sentiment indicators: What does Google Trends tell us about COVID-19 pandemic and employment expectations in the EU new member states?

The sentiment indicators tend to reflect better the social tensions caused by COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the aim of this paper is to reflect the relationship between employment expectations and tensions related to new coronavirus. The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on employment expectations is assessed using the data collected by Google Trends in Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (panel ARDL) models and Bayesian multilevel model. The results indicated that COVID-19 searched on Google had a negative impact on employment expectations in the EU New Member States on the period March 2020-May 2021. The unemployment and inflation rate had also a negative effect, while improvement in economic sentiment indicator has increased the employment expectations. These results are the support of economic policies to reduce labour market tensions and improve employment expectations.