The aim of the paper is to evaluate the relationship between consumers' climate and consumption, looking - respectively - at income-based indicators of confidence and at consumption expenditures disaggregated by durability. We find that confidence significantly contributes explaining consumption...

The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this...

I develop a model of the consumer good market where the individual's search decision is consistent with balanced-growth preferences. Here, optimal search is independent of income but increases with the time endowment. I characterize the potentially multiple equilibria and test whether the model...

We study the role of consumer confidence in forecasting real personal consumption expenditure, and contribute to the extant literature in three substantive ways: First, we reexamine existing empirical models of consumption and consumer confidence not only at the quarterly frequency, but using...

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...