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...

This paper investigates the forecasting power of consumer sentiment for household expenditure. We compare the predictive power of two measures of consumer attitudes, and then further compare each survey's expectations component with one another, and with the broader sentiment measures. The...