Mehr als die Hälfte des Bruttoinlandsprodukts im Euroraum wird für den privaten Verbrauch verwendet. Daher kommt der Genauigkeit von Konsumprognosen eine besondere Bedeutung zu. Da der Konsum maßgeblich von den Stimmungen der Akteure beeinflusst wird, weist die Europäische Kommission...

For most academics and policy makers, the depth of the 2007-09 financial crisis, its longevity and its impacts on the real economy resulted from an erosion of confidence. This paper proposes to assess empirically the link between consumer sentiment and consumption expenditures for the United...

This paper uses Eurobarometer survey data from 26 EU countries to evaluate whether the general public cares about financial stability and imbalances over and above their effects on key macroeconomic variables such as unemployment and inflation. I confirm previous results in the literature that...

Building on Beaudry, Nam and Wang (2011) { hereafter BNW {, we use survey data on consumer sentiment in order to identify the causal effects of confidence shocks on real economic activity in a selection of advanced economies. Starting from a set of closed-economy VAR models, we show that these...

The notion of bounded rationality has received a considerable attention in the midst of debate over the usefulness of various macroeconomic models. In this paper we empirically seek to analyze the baseline New-Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents who may adopt various heuristics used to...

The two opening shots have been fired. On September 11, 2001, someone orchestrated an unprecedented suicide attack on the World Trade Centre in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington DC. The U.S. government immediately laid the blame on Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization. It...

We show that the size of collateralized household debt determines an economy's vulnerability to crises of confidence. The house price feeds back on itself by contributing to a liquidity effect, which operates through the value of housing in a collateral constraint. Over a specific range of debt...

We examine whether consumer confidence - as a proxy for individual investor sentiment - affects expected stock returns internationally in 18 industrialized countries. In line with recent evidence for the U.S., we find that sentiment negatively forecasts aggregate stock market returns on average...

This paper reviews the state of confidence and trust in the Netherlands, with special attention to the financial sector. An attempt has been made to identify the factors that determine individual trust and confidence and to uncover connections between the various variables. Based on surveys over...

We show that the size of collateralized household debt determines an economy's vulnerability to crises of confidence. The house price feeds back on itself by contributing to a liquidity effect, which operates through the value of housing in a collateral constraint. Over a specific range of debt...