We offer a structural interpretation of survey measures of consumer confidence. Our approach is based on a simple forward-looking model of consumption. The model decomposes observed consumption uctuations in changes due to fundamentals, and changes due to temporary errors caused by noisy...

A literature debates the explanations for the cyclical properties of emerging markets using either trend shocks (Aguiar and Gopinath 2007) or financial frictions (Neumeyer and Perri 2004; Garcia-Cicco, Pancrazi, and Uribe 2010). We state a formal proposition that makes explicit the parametric...