In this paper, we use high-frequency transaction data to develop a weekly tracker for private consumption expenditures. Furthermore, we apply the transaction data in a nowcasting experiment and compare their performance with other, readily available indicators that are regularly linked to...

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...

The focus of this paper is on nowcasting and forecasting quarterly private consumption. The selection of real-time, monthly indicators focuses on standard (“hard”/“soft” indicators) and less-standard variables. Among the latter group we analyze: i) proxy indicators of economic and policy...

This article is the first formal investigation of consumer attitudes that compares the forecasting power of the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment and the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index. The authors find that measures available from the Conference Board have both...

We assess the ability of the Reuters/Michigan Surveys of Consumers to predict future changes in consumer expenditures. The information in the Surveys is summarized by means of principal components of consumer attitudes with respect to income and wealth, interest rates, and prices. These summary...

We propose a regression-based algorithm that allows to construct arbitrarily many comparable, multi-annual, consistent time series on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and minute-by-minute search volume indices based on the scattered data obtained from Google Trends. The accuracy of the algorithm...

We use a novel data set covering all domestic debit card transactions in physical terminals by Norwegian households, to nowcast quarterly Norwegian household consumption. These card payments data are free of sampling errors and are available weekly without delays, providing a valuable early...

Could a researcher or policy analyst use data reported from surveys of consumer confidence to improve forecasts of consumer spending? This issue has been examined in the literature previously, which reached the conclusion that consumer confidence data helped improve the forecasts slightly, but...

We study the information content of the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment as well as its five components. Using household data from the Surveys of Consumers, we identify the main determinants of these indicators and document their varying role over the business cycle. Our...