Two remarkable features of the Australian economy over recent years have been strong growth in private consumption … expenditure and household wealth. This paper examines the relationship between consumption and wealth in an effort to better … understand aggregate consumption behaviour. We find a reasonably robust steady-state relationship between non …

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 …