This paper represents a first formal attempt to examine the ability of consumer confidence to forecast household spending within a multicountry framework. To this end, we use two confidence indices, namely the Consumer Confidence Indicator and the Economic Sentiment Indicator, both of which are...

This article examines the usefulness of various measures of consumer confidence in forecasting household spending in the United States. Using the reduced-form equation of Carroll, Fuhrer, and Wilcox (American Economic Review 84:1397–1408, 1994), we find that for the post-World War II period,...