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...