Consumer confidence indicators(CCI) serve as a veritable tool for providing useful information to policy makers, forecasters and the general public. Recent studies indicated the possibility of a slowdown in output, resulting from the pessimism of consumers in their expectations about the general...

What are the effects of beliefs, sentiment, and uncertainty, over the business cycle? To answer this question, we develop a behavioral New Keynesian macroeconomic model, in which we relax the assumption of rational expectations. Agents are, instead, boundedly rational: they have a...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model extended to include heterogeneous expectations, to revisit the evidence that postwar US macroeconomic data can be explained as the outcome of passive monetary policy, indeterminacy, and sunspot-driven fluctuations in the pre-1979 sample, with a switch...

This paper estimates a simple univariate model of expectation or opinion formation in continuous time adapting a 'canonical' stochastic model of collective opinion dynamics (Weidlich and Haag, 1983; Lux, 1995, 2007). This framework is applied to a selected data set on survey-based expectations from...

The relationship between self-employment and some macroeconomic variables is and has been at the heart of the debate about self-employment contributions to employment and economic growth. This paper is devoted to the exploration of the co-movement and causality between entrepreneurship and...

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

DSGE (Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) models are the common workhorse of modern macroeconomic theory. Whereas story-telling and policy analysis were in the forefront of applications since its inception, the forecasting perspective of DSGE models is only recently topical. In this study,...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MS-VAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...