This paper finds that consumer attitudes, as reflected in surveys of consumer sentiment, have a significant influence on household purchases of durable goods. Normally, consumer sentiment moves with current economic conditions and bears a stable relationship to a few economic variables. At times...

This paper tests the ability of consumer sentiment to predict retail spending at the state level. The results here suggest that, although there is a significant relationship between sentiment measures and retail sales growth in several states, consumer sentiment exhibits only modest predictive...

We study adaptive learning behavior in a sequence of n-period endowment overlapping generations economies with fiat currency, where n refers to the number of periods in agents' lifetimes. Agents initially have heterogeneous beliefs and seek to form multi-step-ahead forecasts of future prices...

Learning is introduced into a sequence of large square endowment economies indexed by n, in which agents live n periods. Young agents need to forecast n - 1 periods ahead in these models in order to make consumption decisions, and thus these models constitute multi-step ahead systems. Real time...

Traditionally, real GNP or permanent income or wealth have been the scale variable of choice in empirical money demand equations. Recently, Mankiw and Summers (1986) argue that consumer expenditures are an ideal proxy for permanent income in money demand, and they provide evidence that total...