This article investigates the impact of openness and tariff reductions on the technical inventiveness of selected OECD countries. The results suggest that even these simple forms of trade liberalization may, under certain conditions, favour technical inventiveness or creativity, the most...

Tests based on normalized autocorrelation coefficients have been commonly used by applied researchers to examine the randomness of economic and financial time series. This paper investigates via Monte Carlo simulation the finite-sample properties of these tests for randomness, paying special...

This paper represents a first formal attempt to examine the ability of consumer confidence to forecast household spending within a multicountry framework. To this end, we use two confidence indices, namely the Consumer Confidence Indicator and the Economic Sentiment Indicator, both of which are...

This article examines the usefulness of various measures of consumer confidence in forecasting household spending in the United States. Using the reduced-form equation of Carroll, Fuhrer, and Wilcox (American Economic Review 84:1397–1408, 1994), we find that for the post-World War II period,...