The ongoing unification which takes place on the European political scene, along with recent advances in consumer mobility and communication technology, raises the question whether the European Union can be treated as a single market to fully exploit the potential synergy effects from...

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...

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 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...

This paper addresses a general problem with surveys asking agents for their assessment of the state of the economy: answers are highly dependent on information that is publicly available, while only information that is not already publicly known has the potential to improve a professional...

This paper analyses the leading characteristics of the Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) with respect to stock market returns for 11 New EU Member States. It proposes novel CCI weights by minimizing mean squared errors from regression forecasting equations, using CCI lags as regressors. With...

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...

Commercial rumours are an increasingly prevalent feature of the business environment, and the Web has changed how they are spread. Commercial rumours affect sales and consumer confidence. As soon as a negative rumour begins to spread, sales can fall drastically. The challenge for marketers is to...

We perform an empirical investigation of the socioeconomic determinants and consequences of all mass shootings in the U.S. from 2000 to 2015. We first manually search for and collect information on perpetrators. We find that approximately 40% (45%) of shooters were in financial distress...

Survey-based consumer confidence indicators are mostly reported with a delay and are a result of time consuming and expensive consumer surveys. In this study, to measure the current consumer confidence in Germany, we develop an approach, in which we compute the consumer sentiment using public...