This paper documents that region-level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged income in Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and West Germany. However, region-specific idiosyncratic) consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged region-specific income. Also, excess...

Compared to its central role in policy discussions in the United States and most other developed countries, the reliability of the measurement of the output gap has attracted relatively little academic study. Furthermore, both the academic literature and the debate among practitioners have...