confidence, the perceptions of buyers of consumption goods. This paper examines whether perceptions of sellers of consumption … goods, measured by retail trade surveys, may also improve short-term monitoring of consumption. We find that both consumer …This paper assesses the information content of two survey indicators for consumption developments in the near future …

consumption and real GDP. In line with BNW, we find that confidence shocks explain a large share of the variance in real economic … contribution to business cycle fluctuations is reduced, confirming the global dimension of confidence shocks. Overall, our evidence … shows that confidence shocks play some role in business cycle fluctuations. At the same time, we show that confidence shocks …