The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this...

Exchange rates as well as relative price level and output movements are decomposed into components associated with nominal shocks as well as shocks to aggregate supply and aggregate demand. In contrast to previous analyses of such decompositions based on statistical vector autoregression (VAR)...

This working paper evaluates the economic sources of the stock market responses of 40 countries to surprises in the fed funds rate (FFR), the Fed's forward guidance (FG) and large-scale asset purchases (LSAP). We decompose stock market returns into different components reflecting investors'...