Search results

The objective of this paper is to examine the determinants of the Greek house market during the period 2006–2022 using not only economic variables but also behavioral variables, taking advantage of available information on the volume of Google searches. In order to quantify the behavioral variables, we implement a Python code using the Pytrends 4.9.2 library.

In our study, we assert that models relying solely on economic variables, such as GDP growth, mortgage interest rates and inflation, may lack precision compared to those that integrate behavioral indicators. Recognizing the importance of behavioral insights, we incorporate Google Trends data as a key behavioral indicator, aiming to enhance our understanding of market dynamics by capturing online interest in Greek real estate through searches related to house prices, sales and related topics. To quantify our behavioral indicators, we utilize a Python code leveraging Pytrends, enabling us to extract relevant queries for global and local searches. We employ the EGARCH(1,1) model on the Greek house price index, testing several macroeconomic variables alongside our Google Trends indexes to explain housing returns.

Our findings show that in some cases the relationship between economic variables, such as inflation and mortgage rates, and house prices is not always consistent with the theory because we should highlight the special conditions of the examined country. The country of our sample, Greece, presents the special case of a country with severe sovereign debt issues, which at the same time has the privilege to have a strong currency and the support and the obligations of being an EU/EMU member.

The results suggest that Google Trends can be a valuable tool for academics and practitioners in order to understand what drives house prices. However, further research should be carried out on this topic, for example, causality relationships, to gain deeper insight into the possibilities and limitations of using such tools in analyzing housing market trends.

This is the first paper, to the best of our knowledge, that examines the benefits of Google Trends in studying the Greek house market.

This paper aims to outline a map of all the research that exists on mobile technology and tourism archived in the two main databases worldwide (Web of Science and Scopus). Accordingly, with the identification of all the scientific articles that deal with both mobile technology and tourism, the authors seek to ascertain the evolution of mobile technology in the tourism sector through the years, countries, universities and authors and determine the various collaborations brought about between authors, universities, institutions and/or companies in various research projects. Finally, it also allows the authors to distinguish the main topics under study within the scope of ‘mobile tourism’.

A mixed methodology has been carried out. The search focused on the principal databases of bibliographic references and citations of periodical publications, such as articles from scientific journals, books and other types of printed material. Once the results were obtained in the respective databases, it was necessary to be able to work with them. In this respect, the authors had to extract the relevant data and dump it in a bibliographic reference manager, for which they chose Mendeley. After this, the tabulation of data was performed in Excel and tables and graphs were created from all the data collected.

The main results obtained and analyzed are the number of articles per year, countries and universities. In the same way, it is interesting to highlight the number of countries and universities that participate in each article under study. On the other hand, an analysis has been carried out regarding the number of articles per author, as well as the topics dealt with in the different articles.

This analysis reveals the role that has been played by mobile phones in tourism since the first scientific article was recorded in 2002. In this regard, in recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of articles, finally resulting in moderate figures in relation to countries (40) and universities (233) that have formed part of the subject matter under study. In contrast to other areas of research in tourism, the relevance of this subject is therefore evident, as is the need for greater background knowledge to establish research models adapted to the new reality of tourism in a world of ever-increasing mobility.