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...

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...

This paper examines the ability of consumer confidence to forecast consumption expenditure in New Zealand. A two-step process commonly used by other researchers, which was developed by Carroll, Fuhrer and Wilcox (1994), was utilised. The two most widely followed and reported measures of consumer...

The market share of online purchasing is under two percent of total retailspending, which provides an indication that consumers have been slow to adoptonline purchasing. Previous research has shown that consumers perceive risksassociated with purchasing online and these perceptions are likely to...

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...

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...

This paper develops a notion of consumer confidence within a dynamic competitive equilibrium framework. In any situation where multiple equilibrium prices on next-period spot markets are equally supported by the state of the economy, confidence is encoded in the subjective probabilities...

Although it is generally accepted that consumer confidence measures are informative signals about the state of the economy, theoretical macroeconomic models designed for the analysis of monetary policy typically do not provide a role for them. I develop a framework with asymmetric information in...

Barsky and Sims (2012, AER) demonstrated, via indirect inference, that confidence innovations can be viewed as noisy signals about medium-term economic growth. They highlighted that the connection between confidence and subsequent activity, such as consumption and output, is primarily driven by...

Survey-based indicators such as the consumer confidence are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity, especially for the future path of private consumption. Although they receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power appears to be very limited. Therefore, this paper...