This paper quantitatively investigates the scope for improving welfare by making aspects of the unemployment insurance (UI) system depend on the state of the business cycle. A particular focus is the Canadian system of "Employment Insurance" (EI), which is designed in such a way that the...

Out of 11 questions included in the EU harmonised consumer questionnaire, it is possible to construct 2 047 different consumer confidence indicators. We search through all these indicators in order to find the single indicator that has the highest correlation with private consumption growth....

The consumer confidence index is a highly observed indicator among short-term analysts and news reporters and it is generally considered to convey some useful information about the short-term evolution of consumer expenditure. Notwithstanding this, its usefulness in forecasting aggregate...

Standard theory describes economic decisions as the result of optimising behaviour of well-informed economic agents. However, whether citizens are really well informed on economic data is still highly disputed. In order to investigate on this issue, since 2007 the Italian Consumers survey has...

This study examines the behaviour of key bank level stability factors of liquidity, capital, risk-taking and consumer confidence in Islamic and conventional banks which operate in the same market. Using fixed effect sample of 194 banks of Gulf Cooperating Countries between 2000 and 2007, we...

The traditional consumption function based on the life cycle permanent income hypothesis (LC-PIH) considers that consumer spending is based on households’ expectations of their future income. However, in short-term forecasting, the traditional economic determinants of consumption do not...

This note develops a simple macro model where the pattern of wealth accumulation is determined by a credit multiplier and by the way households react to short run fluctuations. In this setup, long term wealth dynamics are eventually characterized by the presence of endogenous cycles.

The following analysis, based on error correction models, suggests that consumer confidence, together with traditional macroeconomic variables, contains a forecasting and explicative power on consumption. By including consumer confidence in a consumption function, consumer confidence releases a...