How does public attention influence natural gas price? New evidence with Google search data

Public attention on natural gas price, which reflects the demand dynamics, is considered as a new factor to influence the movement of price. So investigate the impact of public attention on natural gas price is an innovative research issue in energy economics. This paper innovatively constructs a measure of public attention and examines its impact on natural gas price. A data set generated from Google Trends is used to measure public attention and then rigorous econometric models are applied to evaluate its predictive ability. The empirical study shows that (i) public attention is closely related to natural gas price, with contemporaneous positive correlation coefficient being 0.59, (ii) public attention leads natural gas price, (iii) the model including public attention data outperforms benchmark model. By using a more direct and representative way of forecasting based on the knowledge collected from the users, this paper also has important implications for applying Internet knowledge to improve the forecast accuracy of other energy price.