We are delighted to announce that Nicolas Woloszko, a former PhD student at THEMA supervised by Guillaume Chapelle and Laurence Jacquet, has been awarded the 4th Prize in Economics by the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris.

The prize recognizes his doctoral research on real-time economic measurement.

His work addresses a crucial challenge for policymakers: how to monitor economic activity as it unfolds, rather than relying on official statistics released months later. To this end, he developed the OECD Weekly Tracker, a tool that uses Google Trends data—capturing search activity related to jobs, housing, business, and consumer behavior—to estimate weekly GDP for 48 countries. By combining these signals with a neural network, the model detects shifts in consumption, employment, and production almost in real time.

This innovative nowcasting approach enables governments and policy institutions to better anticipate and respond to economic shocks. The research was published in the International Journal of Forecasting. Nicolas later applied these weekly GDP estimates in a study published in Nature Communications, demonstrating that COVID certificates helped prevent GDP losses of around €6 billion in France. This work was co-authored with, among others, the recent Nobel laureate Philippe Aghion.